


Moonbroch

by VespertineBloom



Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Accidental Stone Travel, F/M, Ocracoke, au S3
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:07:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24119254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VespertineBloom/pseuds/VespertineBloom
Summary: Nine. Her daughter is nine years old and this is how the world betrays her? A rotten, genealogical curse dragging her back to the timeline of her mother’s deepest grief?  The past had claimed everything else she had and now it wanted her daughter too.Frank takes Brianna on camping trips during Claire's summer surgical residencies; nothing can prepare her for the frantic, fateful call that her daughter has slipped through the veil of time on Ocracoke.  1958/1756.
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Frank Randall, Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Comments: 266
Kudos: 304





	1. Ocracoke

**Author's Note:**

> Just another recycled plot and a first attempt at writing for Outlander. There will be a fair mix of book and show plots because some interpretations pan better than others.

**1958**

_Plink. Plink. Plink._

Jewellery skitters across the hardwood floor like hail against the tarmac, dispersing in chaotic bursts under the vanity and master bed.

Costume jewellery and non-refractive plastic. Enamel brooches. Gold-plated earring studs. An erratic arrhythmia slams against her ribcage as a barrage of curses tumble from her lips.

_Blue box with the ribbon. Satin pouch. Third drawer down._

Frantic hands tease through heirlooms and anniversary panic-buys from _Tiffany’s,_ combing for that _bloody_ signet ring she kept out of some mislaid guilt _._ The vanity rattles against the invasion, proffering up nothing but the dismal tack she had acquired to embellish herself at graduation meals and stale dinner parties.

Her spoils are worthless despite their charm. 

_No gemstones._ She had not wanted anything to serve as a reminder in perpetuum of the temptation she had promised to bury. The irony is not lost on her as she charges across the hall and flings open the door engraved with an ochre ‘B’.

_Jewellery box. Pillowcase. Shoe box in the closet._

The usual magpie hiding spots unearth nothing but a rosewood lipstick she had misplaced last month and a copy of _Jackie_ that had been expressly forbidden. The ebb and flow of raw panic dials to an intensity that threatens to impede her train of thought. 

Time is waning. Two hours and twenty-seven minutes since the call.

_“Claire, it’s my fault…”_

She resolves to fight the burgeoning sting of tears, snatching the sparsest collection of nondescript essentials. Ire and fury battle with her natural propensity for grace as she relents and returns to the master bedroom to raid her closet.

It isn’t his fault.

Not that she had expressed that to him.

A cursory glance over the swing dresses and circle skirts tarnishes any hope for something passable in 1756. The ire reignites when she flits back to the memory of her shift and corset burning on Reverend Wakefield’s lawn, stoked until nothing but ash and ember.

 _I_ _cannot share you with another man. No more combing through the libraries of the world hoping to find some reference to him, or the life you once had._

A bile-inducing thought crosses her mind at the memory of suspender skirts and jumpsuits packed into her child's travel bag. _Just in case_ , she had reprimanded, cognisant of their uselessness for a North Carolinian camping trip. _In case your father isn’t as adept as he once was at catching rabbit._

Fear gives way to a stoic determination and she grabs her purse from the bedside table.

Time shifts in a kaleidoscopic blur, from musty costume stores to _Macy's_ and the customer service desk at Boston International.

Five hours and forty-three minutes since the call.

The panic begins to claw from within, settling like a cinder block on her sternum as she veers the hired Chrysler Plymouth towards the ferry terminal for Ocracoke.

 _Ocracoke._ That hadn’t been on the itinerary.

Goddamn his _insufferable_ need for spontaneity. Always cloying to appease their nine-year-old budding historian.

_Blackbeard…she wanted to learn about Blackbeard. I thought a mere day trip…_

They had only spoken that morning. A syrupy, cheerful breakdown of their North Carolina road trip as she tried to stifle the exhaustion of a ten-hour trauma surgery. She sipped at a cup of coffee black as tar as Brianna fawned over the wildlife she had been tracking in her journal and rattled off dates regarding Fort Macon.

_Did you know there were Pirates in North Carolina, Mama?_

Her veneer breaks in the restroom aboard the seven o'clock ferry. A guttural, terrified sob into discount loo roll that sands uncomfortably across her skin.

Six hours since the call.

Seven since Frank had been able to convince someone on the island to let him use their landline. She was time adjacent. Probably hadn’t had lunch or dinner. She palms the PB&J sandwich in her jacket pocket and anchors herself with a breathy inhale, stemming the tidal wave of _what ifs_.

Fergus had survived a brothel in Paris.

_Milady._

_Still_ too much a painful suture to unpick.

The ferry engine rumbles and settles to a low whirl as it docks at Ocracoke. There’s nothing a cold splash of water can remedy against the rosy blotches marring the skin around her eyes.

Frank waits for her at the dock as she careens into the parking lot, leaning over to open the passenger door.

“Claire-,”

“Where is it?” she demands, running roughshod over his evident torment. It’s a guilt she will unpack later when the time is right, maybe after a large dram of whiskey and a searing fight or two. They’re good at that these days. Of being in warring states and an increasingly common emotional anarchy.

She follows his hurried gestures through a long stretch of road along an ocean-side dune, toeing her plimsoll harder against the gas pedal than the state laws allowed. Consequently, the breaking is harsh when he pistons an arm towards an inlet near the local woods.

Dusk is dragging across the bay as they scramble from the car and trip towards the nature trail, heaving jarring breaths as they practically sprint towards the veiled knoll.

Every fibre of her being is running on hospital dispensed coffee and three hours of sleep in an on-call room. The splitting headache radiating from her temples had been lingering since that morning, pulsating against her skull despite her paracetamol brunch. It was manageable until the _buzz_.

Her tracks slow as the ghost of a memory older than her daughter assaults her senses.

A sound she has only borne witness to at Craigh Na Dun.

Frission electrifies her skin, spreading up and down her limbs with a glacial chill and Frank notices her reticence, “Claire?”

Any words she had expire in her throat at the sight of the second ancient stone circle. The holdall primed with her scavenged essentials slips from her shoulder and thuds to the peat floor.

It almost brings her to her knees.

Some unthinkable part of her brain maintained that Frank must have been playing some cruel trick, a test of their agreed conditions back in 1948. God knows their marriage has been dragged over the coals over the past decade, in large part due to her unwillingness to thaw for him.

But there stood the testament to his distraught call patched through to her OR eight hours prior.

It slips from her lips in habit, “Jesus H Roosevelt Christ.”

The tempest in her gut threatens to surface and if it isn’t for Frank’s support as she keels forward she knows the ground would receive her.

“I know, Darling,” Frank’s voice murmurs at the shell of her ear. A term of endearment long lost to their muddled history.

_There’s a fucking stone circle here, Claire. She’s…I didn’t know…she was here and then…_

The PB&J slaps against her thigh as she finds the will to stand, an urgent reminder of the waning daylight. She withdraws from Frank and drops to the holdall at her feet, unzipping it with unadulterated haste.

A flimsy corset from a short-lived Shakespearean run at the Wilbur Theatre; wool stockings that felt like Brillo; a cotton nightgown to masquerade a shift and a petticoat to befit a milk maid.

“They’ll have to do,” she snaps at Frank’s tepid apprehension, “you burned the originals.”

It’s unwarranted, but she’s so goddamn _tired_.

“I don’t think either of us envisioned _this_ , Claire.”

She stems any further back and forth by shoving the corset at him, making no move to cover up as she pulls the tucked portion of her shirt from the waistline of her dress pants and unbuttons.

“Not making that mistake again,” she mumbles, reaching around her back to undo her brassiere. Whether it was this side of history or that, people had a penchant for burning her belongings.

_It’s from France._

He waits dutifully for her to ready herself, an unspoken air of discomfort that should have been a foreign to man and wife. She thinks he feels unfaithful to _Sandy_. Or Candy, she can never truly remember as much as he thinks that she puts it on to hurt him.

He struggles with the first threading of the ribbon, but with some patient guidance he tightens the bodice until she’s tightly ensconced. Of all the unfathomable things she allows herself to miss in the silent early hours of wakeful morning, this isn’t one of them.

The rest of her ensemble comes together quickly, until she’s shell of her 1950s self and teetering on the edge of a full-scale sprint towards the stones.

_Did you know there were Pirates in North Carolina, Mama?_

With an emerald cut ring joining the traffic of her ring finger she slots the two spares down her bodice until they’re tucked away. She has no idea if they’ll be spared in the transition, but she doesn’t want to worry Frank on that front. Even if Brianna has stayed put there’s no guarantee for a swift catapult back to 1958.

She doesn’t dare to waste another minute and clasps the few essentials she stocked together in a satchel across her body.

She likes to think she’ll be right back, they'll grab a late meal at the diner they passed at the dock. She could be back in Boston scrubbing in on a solo appendectomy by tomorrow as Dr Levy had been promising.

_She could be hurt, you should bring something from the hospital just in case..._

“I’m sorry you can’t come,” she bites out, before turning on her heel with a cowardice that has become her second skin as of late. Though, it’s forced to reckon with Frank as her wrist is pinched in his grasp, roughly steering her back a few paces.

“How do you know where she is? How do you know she’s not back in Scotland?” he challenges her.

“I don’t,” she retorts, snatching her wrist back, “and the longer we wait the more likely something untoward happens. So, if you don’t mind, I’m getting my daughter back.”

“ _Our.”_

She hadn’t meant it like that. Truly. The sentiment of “ours” had fallen to the wayside some months ago now. Brianna was the unwavering core to that foundation, and she would be wise to remember that.

She looks at him then, at her husband who looks like he’s aged a decade in a day. The clench in her jaw softens when she realises he’s shattering before her.

“Please come back,” his tone softens to a plead, “come home.”

 _Don’t take three years_ , she thinks.

“ _Frank_ ,” she exhales, stepping back into his sphere until they’re less than six inches apart, “Brianna belongs here. This is her _home_.”

Jamie had asked that of her.

Frank had asked that of her.

And she had made it so.

“If you find you miss it, that you can’t bear to part…I’d give anything, Claire. We could apply for citizenship, I…I’d give up Sandy. I wouldn’t ask _anything_ from you if you promise to bring her back to me.”

The air cools around them, the balmy sea breeze tapering off in the poetry of the moment.

“Do you really think that lowly of me, Frank?” she returns, as though slapped, “have we reached a place where you’re perception of me is so poor you’d think I’d resort to outright cruelty?”

Is this really who they are now?

“No…that’s not what I meant,” he retracts, rubbing soiled hands over the sun-kissed grooves in his brow, “…you know I never stopped loving you, even if you’ve reconciled that I shouldn’t. That doesn’t just switch off because we can’t be who we were before bloody Scotland. Don’t you see? I’m still at your every beck and call even if you’ve barbed yourself with every ammunition against me.”

“Frank…”

“Just come home, okay?” he settles, fearing the repercussions of such a tangent.

She nods in silent affirmation, mustering the courage to detract from the tension.

She leaves Frank idle in the fallow field, spurred on by the growing crescendo leading her to the stones.

To her daughter.

In 1756.


	2. Holloway's Milk Duds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aiming for a Sun/Mon weekly posting. Standing message for the rest of this fic: This is my first adventure with Outlander so I'm still getting my feet wet.

**_Holloway’s Milk Duds_ **

**1756**

Palm to limestone.

All sense of time and being folds in on itself as though caught in a churning riptide. Gravity concedes to a weightlessness only felt in dream, both beckoning and repelling as the centuries sluff away. History knows she’s anachronistic, cleaving through an already determined chronology, but she slips through by virtue of a gift more powerful than time’s constraints.

As soon as it begins the void quietens, then static as though switching radio channels until the soundtrack of the ocean builds to a rumbling crescendo.

It’s then that the earth of 1756 sparks under her fingertips.

_Brianna._

Spurred awake from a bed of tickseed and sea mallow Claire launches into action as though electrified. The feral, biological instinct claws at her from the inside out. Everything and nothing come at her as the new world falls into her lap.

Standing stones. Beachgrass. Sea-worn oak. 

A gallon of dread slinks down her spine at the empty wilderness before her, as sparse and rugged as the landscape that had first welcomed her through the stones. The balmy evening from her own timeline shifts to overcast skies and a low rumbling offshore warns of an impending storm.

“Brianna!”

Nothing but the kettle-whistle of the wind responds to her cry and manicured nails puncture the soil as she scrambles to gain her footing. Her bodice pinches at her ribs, tightened too firmly by novice hands. It only serves to make each anxiety-ridden breath harder to procure. 

“Brianna!”

Living with the perpetual fear of being splintered apart by circumstances beyond his control, Frank had not been idle in his parenting.

_Keep to your surroundings, don’t stray too far. Sit and wait if you must_ , w _e’ll come to you._

With a renewed adrenaline coursing through her veins she circles the stones, hoping to find a braided mop of russet curled up in sleep on the mallow.

_She’s such a good sleeper._

“Brianna!”

It’s a mantra that pours from her throat until she’s hoarse. For all the flourishing flora and fauna, it may as well have been barren as she sweeps over the scene that would otherwise be a botanist’s dream. Instead, it’s lost to the deluge of fear looping cool tentacles around her heart as doubt begins to cast its dye.

Had her theory been wrong? Was it not someone of love and consequence that tethered you to each plain? Had Brianna splintered to a different period entirely?

Her mind whirrs faster than if she were standing over the body cavity of a surgical patient, desperately trying to anticipate the surgeon's plan. From phone call to traversing time she had left extraordinarily little room for the possibility of being wrong. 

_How do you know where she is?_

In God’s truth she doesn’t. She wills for nothing more than to be able to sense Brianna, for that mother’s instinct that just _knows._ For as much as she loves and cherishes the little girl of Celtic blood, who’s face and thoughts she can read with little fanfare, it’s no match for _that_ enviable power. She must believe that the stones weave their intangible connections or else succumb to the unthinkable.

The encroaching dusk stirs a new panic, threatening the last vestiges of daylight and the ability to track. Though a decade has passed she can still draw from the shallow pool of memory; how to analyse disturbances of the earth and decipher human interference from animals or weather. 

Unwittingly, she’s already set herself at a disadvantage. In her panicked haste there had been no consideration for the scene she had trampled. Hindsight was still a foe to her despite the two hundred years of future knowledge in her arsenal.

She steps back from the circle with purpose and draws back the wild, flustering emotions like an outgoing tide. It’s a honed technique she’s learned both in war and in surgery, a method of focus that she owes a lifetime of thanks for the skirmishes she’s won.

_Assess._

This time she observes the depression of the brush and weed from the weight of her passage. Wind-deposited sand from the ocean-side bank scuffs into the peat from the tread of her boots and upon closer inspection, the prints are entirely singular. No impression from the gummy tread of ruby _Joyce_ sandals that had been gifted earlier that month.

_Oh, Mama, I feel like Dorothy!_

Each flattened brush is suspect and she learns that time isn’t so forgiving after all. She doesn’t really know whether she’s seeing imprints of her nine-year-old or what she wills herself to see. There’s a distinct level of certainty in medicine, of what she’s unearthing and how she can interpret the next course of action, and this isn’t nearly as objective.

Her focus is slowly beginning to erode under the creeping doubt.

Any hunter worth his salt at Leoch would have put her to shame long ago and she’s unsure whether the apology that sits idle on her lips is for Brianna or for _him_.

With every spent minute in the past she feels the lid of that Pandora’s box lift, dredging with it a barrage of grief that she had exiled somewhere in November of ’48. The salted response to that thorn in her side clouds the focus she’s fought to maintain, almost obscuring the mismatching material in the brush near the fourth stone.

Surprised she overlooked it on her last inspection she darts over to the bluegrass, heart in her throat. So small, so inconspicuous and something that would have been of little consequence in 1958…but here it could only mean one thing.

A torn _Holloway’s Milk Duds_ carton burns with a fervent validation.

_Mama, don’t be mad…Daddy let me have chocolate for breakfast._

Never could she be more thankful for American candy and Frank’s utter disregard for her rules than in that moment.

The little cardboard box sears a white-hot hope at her fingertips, a sign that her daughter’s belly was full - even if a little sickly so-…that she was _here_ and _existed_.

As terrifying as that notion could be considering the ramifications of someone so young navigating the past, the landscape she’s facing changes. The matter of _when_ flips to a matter of _where_ and those are odds she’s better equipped to deal with.

The box slips into her satchel despite its pointlessness, the most threadbare tie to her daughter wandering the Outer Banks of Colonial America.

It’s enough to prompt her to shift her attention away from the stones and towards the direction she had departed from Frank. Brianna would have been smart enough to retrace her steps, veritably unsettled by the disorienting journey thrust upon her and seeking her father’s comfort.

It happened that way lately, that in moments of distress she would be second fiddle to Frank’s open arms. More so since she ramped up her study schedule as examinations and graduation loomed.

She packs that guilt away for another time and stalks a resolute path from the knoll and down into the field. Despite the ethereal sensation of time-travel, a small sliver of her fears Frank’s presence before her. An odd, back-handed relief when nothing but a vast emptiness confirms the shift.

The terrain sinks under her feet; the unworked land is practically a salt marsh and each footstep drags like her boots are weighted with cement.

A realisation strikes her like lightning, switching her focus and she scans the field with a sharp oscillation.

She drops the fistfuls of skirt and forsakes a clean dress to maintain her balance, skimming the surface of the marsh until she finds a disjointed set of footprints marching towards the beachfront. The marsh becomes her saviour as the adrenaline charges her weary limbs and helps to propel her against the stick of the earth.

It takes every last wisp of energy she has left before she falls to palms and knees on the sand dune. It takes a further herculean effort to shirk the bone-weary exhaustion seeping into her joints as she clambers over the mound and practically slides down the embankment. Her satchel catches and she wastes precious time dusting off and repacking the meagre essentials she’d scraped together.

If not for Brianna’s sake she would have abandoned it all.

It’s supposed to shock her, the lack of road that she’d driven not an hour ago, stripped in favour of an untarnished coastline. Having experienced the splicing of time already she no longer bows to the awe, but she can’t help but to torment herself over the effect it would have on Bree. No Buick parked up where her father had left it. No sun-bleached tarmac promising a safe route home.

No one.

She struggles to swallow that image and follows the tracks in the lunar glow of dusk. By now the sun has retired and the air is cooling, urging her onward at the threat of Brianna alone in the dark. The hems of her skirts begin to weigh down as the fabric soaks up water from the sand, slapping at her ankles and occasionally tripping her stride. 

The trail knots a few metres later, a frantic mash of sandal prints splintering off at all points of a compass. Two steps east, one step north, three south.

A moment of panic.

The cinder block of guilt on her chest threatens to crack clean through her sternum. How could she expect a child to navigate what she had survived by the skin of her teeth at twenty-seven?

To see Brianna’s struggle etched into the sand is as much a knife to her gut as an eighteenth-century dirk. 

She fixates on the silhouette of an object laid on the sand a few feet from where the trail peters off and the discovery is far more disconcerting than candy.

She plucks the ruby patent leather sandal from the ground and clutches it to her breast, a sound she’s certain she hasn’t made before wrenching from her lips. The roaring of the ocean cedes to a tinny ringing in her ears as the thoughts churn actively in her mind, desperately trying to fathom how the possibility of one sandal so close to the rising tide could be of no consequence.

“Brianna!” she roars back at the ocean, defying it to answer her with equal rage.

_Did you know there were Pirates in North Carolina, Mama?_

The onslaught of possibilities begins to hail down and the stoicism she’s shouldered since Boston crumbles to a fine ash. 

This isn’t stemming the bleeding of a half-detonated leg in France, nor facing the volley of cannon-fire on Culloden.

There is no stiff upper lip for this.

Bubbling sea spray mocks her with every inch of advancement upon the shore; it spits and hisses less than a metre from the leftover indent of where the sandal had lain. 

She scans the beach fervently, pleading for the trail to pick back up, for another ruby sandal or a cranky little girl waiting on the sandbank. 

The last traceable remains of her daughter’s existence fall before the Atlantic Ocean. The motion picture in her head can’t write it off. How could the plot end here? 

The skies finally open and spatter down a vicious torrent to the backdrop of thunderclaps.

“Brianna!”

_Yer shaking so hard it’s makin’ my teeth rattle._

“Shock,” she murmurs to herself, barely registering the creeping numbness flaring in her hands and feet. 

Only when the frigid damp permeates the wool of her stockings does she realise she’s on her knees, cradling the sandal in her lap.

_Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside._

Anything she has left to give comes up as a putrid yellow bile splattered on the sand.

Of any moment in time, past, present or future, _this_ is where she feels truly empty.

Nine. Her daughter is _nine_ years old and this is how the world betrays her? A rotten genealogical curse dragging her back to the timeline of her mother’s deepest grief? 

And for what? To claim back the life her mother stole from the jaws of time? The life she saved from the _fucking_ bloodbath at Culloden?

She had already paid her penance for that. The past had claimed everything else she had and now it wanted her daughter too. 

The numbness slithers to the crook of her elbows and the bodice that had felt so binding on the knoll forgives nought as the rattling of her teeth spreads to her chest.

_I do like to be beside the sea._

The breaths she can manage feel like sandpaper against her trachea. 

She tries to call Brianna’s name once more, but the syllables suffocate under the strain of a heaving sob leaving only “Bree” to sail with the wind.

Her peripheral vision is lost to a blurriness she can’t shake, and every extremity languishes under a beckoning anaesthesia.

She can’t bear it.

_So just let me be beside the seaside._

_***_

_Cold._

Has the ocean claimed her?

It’s a sensation that even Loch Linnhe in winter couldn’t stir, a cold so deep it wouldn’t surprise her if it’s frozen the marrow in her bones.

She relinquishes a groan through clenched teeth.

_“S’alright, Lass, we’re almost there now.”_

Purgatory? Hell? The distinction really doesn’t matter in the end, she’s not so sure they’re any different. Pain is pain and that she’ll gladly suffer.

“ _Tha thu beò_.”

The ghost of a smile settles at the corner of her mouth at the sound of Gaelic with a Scottish lilt. She never learned enough in the time she was gifted to be able to translate, but the comfort and warmth it brings salves the pain a fraction. 

_“She’s colder than Cairngorm ice, Arch.”_

A soft friction sands over the plane of her cheek and it’s as comforting as the Gaelic, reminding her of a moth-balled memory of Julia Beauchamp’s affections.

At some point the analgesia of cold thaws from her limbs, unleashing a wildfire throughout her joints and ligaments. It throws her back to freezing nights in Boston and the hiss-inducing burn of steaming bath water the first time she dips her toes in.

The stimuli break through the infernal fog and she hisses reactively, jaw muscles clenching from the pressure at her temples. 

_“Dinna fash, a nighean, it’ll take some time but ye’ll warm up soon_.” 

Consciousness snaps back like the release of a rubber band, a split, sharp shock like the moment before hitting the ground in a dream. A jolt roils up her spine and she springboards from back to sitting with spitfire speed, aggravating the nausea pitted in her stomach.

A hand immediately comes to settle on her shoulder, followed by reassurance.

“Easy there. Yer safe.”

It’s dim, but in the flicker of lamplight she can make out the bowels of a crude shanty cabin. The wind beats against the tenement with force, teasing the walls to and fro, but the foundations fight fair. Dried kelp hangs from the rafters and there’s a small green-ember fire crackling at the hearth; it’s not a place that makes her feel unwelcome by any means.

Poised at her side and across the room are her two rescuers, an elderly couple who seem to have seen their fair share of hardship. Donned in threadbare garments they portray a frailty not only induced by age but by poor nutrition to boot. The woman perched at the edge of her cot seems to have a perpetually pinched look about her despite the warmth she shares in affection. The man is tall and lithe with scanty white locks drawn up from a receding hairline, genial enough in the way he offers her a friendly nod at her inspection.

They’ve shown her nothing but mercy and yet she can’t overthrow the stab of betrayal she feels at being saved.

“Archibald Bug,” the man raises a sun-worn hand to his chest, then motions to the lady at her side, “and my wife, Murdina. This is our shiel, it’s not sae big but it’s a fair sight warmer than the beach, ye ken?”

Scots.

Of all the people in the world.

His wife, _Murdina_ , splays a palm across her knee, “I said tae Arch it was a glorious thing fer us tae have found ye a’fore the storm let doon. Ye was near blue when we found ye. The tide was close tae drawin’ ye back from whence ye came. I was prayin’ to Christ and Our Lady all evenin’ fer yer to wake.”

They think she’s been shipwrecked. It’s a fair relief not to have to think of a backstory for herself and she accepts a steaming bowl and spoon from Murdina with a croaked thanks. 

“Bone broth,” Murdina nods at the bowl, “it’ll light a fire in ye for a while and keep away the chilblains.”

She swallows a couple of spoonfuls to be polite, but her hunger is still out at sea. Maybe Murdina can sense that because she gently takes the bowl back and sets it on a side table.

She’s grateful for the opportunity to avoid that facade.

They watch her with caution as though she wields some unseen danger. Though she’s nothing but washed out and cold, the island is known for its tumultuous history.

_Did you know there were Pirates in North Carolina, Mama?_

“Claire,” she finally proffers, “my name is Claire.”

She doesn’t know what _nom de guerre_ to use anymore. Beauchamp and Fraser were wanted and Randall scorches her every time she thinks about it. So, she leaves it at Claire.

_Plain Claire._

“Weel, Claire, ye did fine to survive such a storm. God must have ye in his favour,” Mrs Bug burns with positivity as her husband retires to the chair in the corner of the cabin.

“Not likely,” Claire dismisses the optimism, the lone red sandal anchored in her mind drawing a fresh burning behind her lids.

Mrs Bug re-establishes the hand on her knee, an understanding in her eyes, “Did ye ken anyone on the ship?”

She nods, biting back the torrent threatening to spill over.

There’s no truth in what she can tell her except for the excruciating pain of it all. She weaves a tale of a journey from Boston with an end to South Carolina with as much fluff as she can muster to prop up the lie. 

Whether Mrs Bug finds her story believable is no matter of concern for her. The weight of her emotions is enough to anchor it as truth. Both Mr and Mrs Bug offer up their condolences when she tells them she expected to find her daughter on the island. 

“Ocracoke is nay 16 miles,” Arch Bug pauses drawing from his pipe, “if the lass had landed the island would ken about it. Nay, ye canna swim tae the mainland.”

Murdina flashes him a scathing look, “stop yer bletherin, or d’ya _want_ tae upset the lass?”

Upset is a feeling she’s long surpassed. 

_Hollow. Lifeless. Without reason to live._ They’re all better descriptors and still fall woefully short of the razor-sharp anguish flaying her heart to scraps. 

“Yer husband will want tae ken, I’m sure,” Mrs Bug advises with a quiet tentativeness. Though, she senses the story is also an enjoyment for the housewife who has been hanging onto her every word. She’s a veritable Robinson Crusoe.

Frank’s pitiful face has been infiltrating her thoughts and she can scarcely find a quiet moment to mediate the storm in her head.

_Promise to bring her back to me._

She can feel his utter dismay from two centuries away.

“He’s dead.”

In this timeline her words ring true. Dead and mouldering in the fields of Culloden. And Frank? Well, for all his usefulness he may as well be. 

It’s vicious of her, she knows that. Something she’ll likely regret ever thinking lying awake at birdsong. Right now, though? She’s wounded. The world owes her that forgiveness.

“Sounds like ye lead a hard life, _a nighean_. Yer welcome tae stay the night, rest. If ye wish Arch will ride ye down the bank come sunup and look for yer lass. There will be a boat fer the mainland come noon.”

Her thank you falls inorganically, though she’s sure she’s the only one who realises it.

Murdina potters around the cabin attending her like the nanny Uncle Lamb had hired for three minutes. Her jacket and petticoat layers return to her fire-dried and folded; a bucket of warmed saltwater is brought to her with some clean cotton rags and she tries not to roll her eyes when the little stout woman fetches a wooden comb for her curls.

If Brianna is as safe and sheltered as she is at this moment, she only hopes that someone is treating her daughter as kindly.

Only when she’s scraping peat and sand from under her nails does she notice the absence of her third ring. While missing a gemstone she was relying on it as a source of income if the time called for such a measure. Instinctively, she probes a forefinger under the neck of her bodice, relief flooding her veins when she feels the two velveteen ring boxes safely tucked at her breast. Her dual wedding rings are still firmly in place so she can forgive herself for the loss of the third.

When it comes to retiring the Bugs offer her the cot, hushing her firm protest to make herself comfortable in one of the chairs. She has no intention of sleeping and the added guilt of imposing on two elderly Samaritans isn’t something she wants to add to her load this evening. 

To her chagrin, Arch Bug is already fly-catching and Murdina swats her away with a knitting needle until she falls onto the cot in a heap of resignation.

As the night wears on and her muscles protest, she submits to laying down to relieve the ache. The Bugs haven’t been afforded the American dream of her time and it shows in the sparsity of their lives. She lays her head on a folded pile of blankets and can’t help but to wonder and fret about where Brianna might be resting.

Claire’s first night in 1743 was spent atop a horse with nothing but a stranger’s tartan to fend off the rain. Granted, that discomfort had eventually led to Brianna’s existence, but those worlds were far apart with little common ground. 

_You need not be scared of me, nor anyone else here. So long as I’m with you._

“I can hear ye thinkin’ over here,” Mrs Bug trilled from her chair, needles clacking, “ye’ll be doin’ you and the bairn a disservice if ye dinna put yer heid doon.”

She makes a show of readjusting herself and musses the blankets, hoping it will fend off further prying. She’s indebted to their kindness, but for her sanity she needs a little less hovering.

Mussing the blankets is a mistake and she makes the already uncomfortable headrest even more so. A hardened pressure digs into the back of her skull and it’s a nuisance enough for her to start groping through the layers until the offending object is tucked into her palm. Once unfurled she rolls it between forefinger and thumb, then lifts it into the cast off of the oil lamp.

_Mama, will this be mine one day?_

The world falls out from underneath her.

Time splints.

One minute she’s laying prostrate in bed and the next she’s hurled into a corner brandishing a meat cleaver.The blade flickers with refracted light, aimed shakily at the cowering couple suddenly roused from rest. Any guilt she possesses is extinguished by the blind rage fissuring from head to toe.

“Miss Claire, what in the _Devil_ himsel-”

“Where did you get this?” she demands, raising a gold band into view.

An uneasy quiet follows. It’s the first time Murdina Bug hasn’t immediately found reason to open her mouth. 

Her grip tightens on the cleaver in fear it will slip from the clamminess of her palm. Arch Bug most certainly has a more deadly weapon set aside for confrontations such as these and she’s well aware a cleaver is no match for a musket.

The twentieth century signet ring she dangles from her forefinger overturns every minute she’s spent thinking about whether she should be _mourning_ her daughter.

Livid doesn’t even begin to cover it.

“Well?!” she snarls, “admit it before your _Lord_ and _Lady_. How in the bloody hell do you have my _child’s_ ring in your possession?!”

Of the pair, Arch is the first to raise his hands in a half-surrender, calmly showing his empty-handed approach. 

“Yer daughter, she a wee bonnie thing about sae high?” he asks, lifting his arthritis mangled hand to wherever four foot five landed against him, “wi the sun spots an’ red hair?”

Claire feels herself nodding, words failing at the confirmation that Brianna had made it _this_ far. Atlantic be damned. 

“Aye, then th’bairn was here and that there ring she left behind as payment.”

Unable to hold herself in any longer Mrs Bug burst out from under Arch’s shoulder with a flurry of explanation. 

“The poor wean was in a fright! She couldna find her father, no shoes and her dress Miss Claire, no petticoat or jacket to speak of! Soaked to the bone just like yersel. Spoutin’ language I hadna heard in my lifetime. Isn’ tha sae, Arch? What was it the lass called a carriage?”

But the matriarch continued feverishly. 

“-oh, and the way of speakin’, she didna sound like yersel Miss Claire, oh no. We thought somethin’ had tae have happened at sea. Tis nay a place fer bairns on this island. S’full ‘o the piracy and smugglin’. Tis why we knew tae scour the beach in case the sea were tae forgive more souls.”

Her grip on the cleaver remains tight, for whatever explanation she’s given, her daughter isn’t in the room. 

“Then where is she?” her voice trembles.

Mrs Bug continues, “She said her father was takin’ her on some journey. We thought him lost at sea, and yer lass was ever so tearful about that. She was convinced that ye were back in Boston and she wanted to go home, ye ken? Couldna get the wean to calm down ‘til John Quincy Myers offered tae row her tae Wilmington and see her tae Boston. We didna know her father tae be dead or her mother aboard the same ship.”

_John Quincy Myers. Boston._

The cleaver drops from her grip and clatters to the floor. How much time has she wasted? How far had they ridden? 

A man with her child. A _stranger_. 

“How could you let her go alone with him?” she turns to the couple now fused together in an embrace, “she’s a _child.”_

“Nay, Dear,” Arch side-lines Murdina’s automatic volley, “ye’ll find John a most honourable man. The lad is of the mountains, ye ken? Wi’ the war brewin’ between England and France ye need somebody that kens the tribes and can survive the backcountry. Ain’t no finer man ter take her home.”

Except she isn’t going _home_ ; she’s riding into a seven-year war.

Of all the bastard things the world could do to her.

The dye is cast.

“I have to go.”

The Bugs are appalled.

“Mistress Claire, it isnae possible! No man of his right mind will cross the ocean til’ mornin’!” Murdina cries, tossing a well-worn glare back at her husband to do _something_.

In 1958 she runs on caffeine and a strict schedule, every minute coordinated in the pursuit of her surgical goals and maintaining the pretence of a wholesome fifties family.

Here she unspools; the past has a knack for stripping her back and baring the ruthless wild of her core. It’s how she can fathom running headfirst into a storm with nothing but the clothes on her back and expect victory despite the odds stacked against her.

In some cases, it has nearly gotten her killed.

In others…well, Wentworth prison was testament enough.

“Mistress,” Arch’s fingers curl gently around her elbow as she frantically ties the threads of her last skirt, “Lass, ye’ll be signin’ yer death warrant if yer to go tae sea this evenin’. Ye’ll never see yer wean again.”

The steadfast ardency carved into her jaw clenches with righteous indignation. She pulls her elbow away and tucks it back against herself, valiantly trying to discount the pleading intonation of his warning.

“No gold in th’ world will force a man tae water, they ken the number o’ men who never returned. I ken ye want yer lass and in the mornin’ we’ll do the same fer ye as we did fer her.”

She toys with the strap of her satchel, back turned against the concern in some fear that if she faces them she’ll be convinced.

No matter who she conjures in her mental fight to disprove the Bugs they all fail to side with her uprising. It’s tragically comical that she can’t even seem to win a fight against her own mind.

The lid is finally breaching.

_He’d_ know what to do. Together.

No one half on either side of a century, hoping the other has enough tact and gumption to do what needs to be done. For anything that may come is secondary to what they’ve already survived.

He would remind her of that.

He _did_ remind her of that.

The dirk is back, jacked under her ribs. She’s missed and pined for him longer than she thought a heart could remember, fought many a fight in his memory whether influenced by tongue-loosening whiskey or not. She’s given less of herself to others and trampled perfectly reverential gestures whilst claiming to have accepted and honoured the conditions asked of her.

And yet, the most she’ll ever miss him will be now, in the face of this, fighting for the piece of history that will remember them forever.

He rings louder than the rest.

_Stay._

She does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes: Moral of the story: If yer gold goes a missin’, look for The Bugs. 
> 
> “Tha thu beò" : You are alive.
> 
> If one were to know me it's that I like a little bit of exposition. I know it's not everyone's cup of tea so thank you if you've made it this far. Next up: Mainland NC & a surprise.


	3. The Butcher

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my first rodeo. That's all for today.

_**1758** _

The slap of the waves against the dory on Pamlico Sound is enough to turn any sturdy seafarer’s gills green. With every rollicking wave the sun-baked stench of red drum and flounder assaults her, a pungent odour as bad as the trench foot she’d treated in France. She’s survived and slummed with much worse she muses, but the fish corralled together, seizing in the netting by her feet do nothing to help matters.

The Bugs had dispatched her onto the only available boat parting from the island. The bi-weekly schooner that could have sailed her to Wilmington by late afternoon had already disembarked with John Quincy Myers and Brianna the previous day. With a pittance between them, and Claire’s unwillingness to trade the spare rings so early in the journey, they had convinced a local fisherman to sail her to Portsmouth Island where she could find an alternative vessel.

This is how she comes to sit across from Denys Doyle, a beady-eyed man sour with contempt for the world and anyone who crossed him in it. He has no qualms airing his disdain over the paltry offer of the gold-plated earrings she takes off as an incentive to row her to the mainland. Arch’s added offer to indebt himself for a day’s labour sweetens the pot and she internally sighs with relief, secretly terrified at the prospect of losing the signet ring Brianna loved so.

It’s a kindness from the Bugs she doesn’t expect after her grievous behaviour with the cleaver, but she assumes that they’re as glad to see the back of her as she is of the island.

The current has been fighting them across the passage of the sound, drawing them east and away from the looming banks of Portsmouth Island. With every riptide they endure the hours chip away under the beating of the sun’s rays and at high noon her cheeks are aflame with sunburn.

“ _Begorra_!” Denys grits out, arched and sweating over the rudimentary oars like an ape, “this ain’t worth my strength for you, Bowsabella.”

She rolls her eyes.

“I offered to help.”

“An’ let you drift us to Greenland? Not a’fore I croak,” he dismisses, firing a dark jet of chewed tobacco spittle over the starboard side.

In one heart-weary moment she can see Angus in him, little and stout in stature and rough around the edges. The Irish lilt replaces the often rhenish-laced Scots, but the sentiment remains. 

The shift in centuries hails down a maelstrom of memory and while she’s borrowed from her own time, she doesn’t feel as bound to the conditions Frank had asked of her. Each fissuring crack weighs a little less heavy than the hours before, the guilt less burning than moments of weakness in 1958.

This was her world once.

The guilt manifests in other ways. For the man she’s left behind in an America older than the one before her; the daughter she’s blighted with a double-dealing gift; and for the memories suppressed of the _other_ man she had left behind. Drifting across the Atlantic at a lethargic pace gives her ample time to wallow in that self-imposed act of contrition.

“Fish ain’t gonna be worth nothin’ but gannet fodder if this tide don’t break off,” Denys strains the oars so that their position is aligned back with the island’s shore, “you’ll be owin’ me more than gold if the catch ain’t profitable with the traders.”

“Then we can only hope that they’re feeling generous today,” she bites back, grimacing as a viscous trail of mucus from the netted fish dampens the hem of her skirt.

Fishing boats. She’d bloody hated them on trips with Frank before the outbreak of war and she hated them now.

It’s a reprieve when the ceaseless waves left churning by the previous day’s storm ebb and land begins to creep towards them. The beach is scattered with driftwood and debris, battered as fiercely as Ocracoke, but the small port settlement endures. As soon as the hull hits the sandbank she’s met with Denys’ outstretched palm. 

She’s not even landside before she’s prising her thirtieth birthday present from her ears and relinquishing them to her surly oarsman. She hopes that Frank will forgive the method of payment for the benefit of their daughter. It had irked and pained him for years to see the Lallybroch band sit so comfortably on her right hand. In the years after her return -up until recently -far more expensive and needless presents had been purchased in some vain attempt to upstage the modest piece. 

The silent battle had waged up until her thirty-fifth birthday when jewellery shifted to a pair of driving gloves. Any gifts of that nature that she might happen upon in a sock drawer or side table thereafter were usually never seen again.

“Though it sounds like you’re tryin’ to milk the pigeon, I hope you find your daughter,” Denys quips, tearing her from her reverie, as he stuffs the earrings into a handkerchief and then down into the crevice of his boot. 

Whilst the sentiment is nice enough from the prickly fisherman, she can decode the underlying translation. She deboards with as much grace as she can covered in fish residue and clambers over the hull onto dry land. 

“Town is but half a mile from here,” Denys nods towards their right, “good luck barterin’ for passage, sailors in these parts ain’t likely to take a woman aboard.”

“You’re not coming?” she quips back, “after all that bloody gab about your precious fish?!”

Her irritation earns her his first smirk.

“G’day, Mistress. I hope you find no cause to find yourself aboard my vessel again.”

As soon as the dory lands it’s back out to sea. She’s a little perturbed at being dumped ashore on a lightering port with nothing but the satchel on her back, but there’s a fire in her belly and woe-betide the man who refuses her passage.

The town of Portsmouth welcomes her with nothing but suspicion; leery eyes follow her from the sand dunes and up along the track leading to town. The port is slapdash at best, seemingly erected overnight and it’s hard to distinguish the general post office from the tavern, but the rowdy merriment from the building to her left says enough for what she can’t see. 

She side-steps a drunkard passed out beside a woodpile and quickens her pace through the main street. A large trading vessel eclipses the east side of the port and she’s desperate to inquire about its onwards route before it disembarks. 

Worry laces and knots itself deep in her chest knowing her child is likely wandering the bustling streets of Wilmington. The name John Quincy Myers has been something of a plague in her mind, spinning her thoughts down the darkest of alleys. The Bugs assure her he is a man of good stead, a little too jovial after English manufacture, but a sound trader and reputable within North Carolina. 

_Even the Natives ken his worth._

They are hollow words in the face of Brianna’s upended world. She can only pray and hope that her daughter’s keen sense of the world around her is altered, that she recognises the shift and knows to keep her twentieth century life tucked away until she’s safe on the other side of history. 

A flashback of the dock in Cranesmuir prickles the hairs on the back of her neck. 

_Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live._

Finding passage isn’t as easy as it had been with Jamie leading the negotiations. Without a husband at her side to iron out a tolerable steerage fee and promise the keep of his woman she’s already at a disadvantage. One of the working girls at the brothel tells her the ship is _The Glenroy_ , due to leave port by sundown and headed to the West Indies; though, it frequently stops to unload in Wilmington with English furnishings and textiles. _That_ information doesn’t come without an offer to earn her passage under Madame Hale’s service - an offer she rejects with as much delicacy as she can muster.

She’s pointed in the direction of the general post office whereupon the postmaster washes his hands of any help and circles her back to the tavern at the port. Whilst docked primarily to unload cargo the crew delight in a chance for offshore revelry, and one sailor that inches too close for comfort with ale-laden breath, tells her of Captain Lawrence.

It’s her chance.

In true Claire fashion, she casts aside any meekness and boldly waltzes through the tavern and seats herself directly in front of the Captain assumptive.

A raucous laugh pulls from the throat of a gammon-faced gentleman to her right as the table sobers. She interrupts a high stakes round of whist; a convoluted game Jamie had never been able to drum into her but one that had earned them fair coinage in tight situations. It’s a feat not to lose herself in that memory, in the haze of their wayfaring days, but the sneering contempt circling the table at her presence does well to keep her anchored.

“I’ll thank you to find that if we are in need of company, we’ll call on Madame Hale personally,” Captain Lawrence issues from the head of the table. His tone mirrors that of hers when she’s scolding Brianna for misbehaving and any shred of hope she has for an amicable exchange extinguishes. The eighteenth century is always quick to remind her of a woman’s place in a patriarchal society.

She does her best to channel the energy of the combat nurse she’d left in France.

Splice and suture. No anaesthesia.

“I require passage to Wilmington.”

The laughter whips around the table again and Captain Lawrence glares at her with unrestrained contempt. 

“I do believe you’ve mistaken us for a packet ship, Madam. A rather bold assumption considering the scale and stateliness of our steer in port. To be quite frank, the proposition is insulting.”

She can feel the burn of ire flooding the sunburnt plains of her cheeks. It belies her calm and makes a mockery of her stalwart nature. She’s so _tired_ of having to run these rings around the men in her life just to be able to be afforded a basic grace. 

So, she changes tactics. 

“How many men have you lost to sickness since disembarkation?” 

“I’d say that’d be none of your business, _Mistress_ ,” Gammon Face retorts, pounding his tankard of ale against the tabletop and sloshing malty hops across the wood.

Her keen medical eye has already roved over a sampling of the ship’s crew. From afar she’s made several tentative diagnoses ranging from scurvy to pellagra and a potential case of pneumonia. The tavern is heaving with maladies and if there’s a ship surgeon she assumes it’s some unqualified quack from a medical guild using bloodletting as a cure all. 

For a crew working the size of the ship stationed at the port the numbers don’t tally up.

She ignores the coarseness of her seatmate and asks again, “how many?” 

Suspicion heightens and the gangly band of drunken half-wits, each with their own visible maladies, glare at her with distrust and malice.

She may as well have said nothing at all. 

“Pray tell,” Captain Lawrence slumps back in his chair, prideful arrogance dripping from the smirk plastered across his sun-leathered jaw, “ how _does_ an English woman of such breed find herself in Portsmouth, interrogating a royal naval vessel on the constitution of its crew?” 

The conversation loops back on itself and she quickly realises that whatever conversational tactic she attempts, a bullish arrogance will quickly follow. 

Some cases are rarely worth fighting and she’s on borrowed time already, but the fight for Brianna burns brighter than any act of surrender that festers in the recesses of her mind.

“I’m a healer,” she pushes, “a _surgeon._ ”

While that may be her only white lie, she knows her medical capabilities - even before officially graduating medical school - far outweigh any medical professional in 1756. 

Of course, that ruffles some feathers and rouses disbelief. 

“A basic observation of your crew suggests up to a quarter of men may perish before you dock in the West Indies, but I’m sure your ship’s surgeon has the situation at hand,” she concedes, pushing herself away from the table in hopes she can entice further conversation. 

It has the unintended effect.

Gammon’s hand whips out to snatch her wrist in a fury, curling it at an awkward angle that makes her yelp. He draws her up and against him with a force that threatens to snap every bone in her wrist.

“Is that a curse?” he challenges her, decaying breath washing over her in a foul plume, “because we don’t need no jezebel bedamning the souls of these men.”

Captain Lawrence holds firm until her protestations can no longer be curbed by sheer will.

“Enough, Giles.”

She’s nothing but background noise to the rest of the tavern as she trips on release and falls against the table edge.

“ _As I said_ , Madame – the ship is business only.” 

_Bastards._

Defiance writes itself across her brow, but she knows when the jig is up. She leaves the tavern with her chin primly held aloft to spite the embarrassment they want to tease from her. If they think that’s the worst a woman can endure then more pity them. Violence isn’t something she takes lightly, but the brawl at the inn back in Scotland flickers in her mind; what she would pay to see those last few minutes transpire in front of their ghosts.

Hunger strikes her something chronic as she searches for a quiet place to plan her next move. The measly spoonfuls of bone broth have long been digested and she can feel the tremble of malnourishment settling over her. Her knees practically collapse once she’s at a safe distance from the tavern and she folds into a pouf of skirts and petticoat onto the sandbank.

The PB&J sits against her thigh, heavy with temptation; back in modern Boston she hadn’t the foresight to imagine that Brianna’s rescue could span more than a day. A new sense of guilt laps at her heels as she plucks the sandwich from the deep pockets of her skirt. Every bite she swallows sits like lead in her belly, for every bite she takes is one from Brianna, even if stale and warped from the turbulence of her journey.

There are no Jennys or Mrs Fitzs tucked away on the island to come and console her or to show her how things are managed; she’ll have to use her own wiles to figure out a better strategy. It strikes her then, that she’s never truly felt alone as she does now. When she first passed through the stones she had no objective but to make it back to Craigh Na Dun, and while loneliness had soured her days in Leoch, she always had a shoulder to lean on in Jamie before and after they were married.

In colonial America she has nobody but herself to rely on. Even if Jenny and Ian survived the aftermath of Culloden, Lallybroch was more than an ocean away.

The fresh air and sustenance bless her with a greater sense of clarity and she takes the time to mull over her next move. There hasn’t been another arrival in port since Denys moored the dory, leaving her truly little to work with. Another vessel could take a day if not a week before mooring at Portsmouth and increases the risk of diluting the trail to Brianna. The only feasible option she can reasonably consider is stowing away in the cargo hold of _The Glenroy_ before the crew returned from the tavern.

It’s a threadbare plan and dicey at best.

People had tried to coax her out of Wentworth, and for all the horrors endured in that dungeon, she had been victorious. With due diligence and some precautions, she would only have to manage a few hours in the holdall until landing at Wilmington. 

The obvious risks are her gender and the possibility of illicit cargo. Captain Lawrence seemed stately enough, but the excessive mistrust and defensiveness makes her wonder if furnishings and textiles are all the ship is transporting. 

“Ma’am!”

Hurried footfalls beating down the embankment garner her attention. A cabin boy no more than thirteen scrambles towards her in a flurry of panic, “Ma’am, you must come!”

“Me?” she furrows her brow, dusting off the sand from her outfit.

The boy oscillates from either foot like a new-born deer, springing with urgency, “Captain sent me, Mistress, it’s Old Davey - somethin’ terrible ails him!”

That piques her interest. 

“The _Captain_ sent for me?” she queries him, as if she’s misheard that part, “Captain _Lawrence_?” 

“Aye, Ma’am, he told me to bring you back to the tavern. He’ll ‘av my hide if we aren’t back soon. Come, Ma’am.”

“You’ve a ship’s surgeon, have you not?” she tests, curious if her assessment at the tavern had been right.

“No Ma’am, Doc Lewis came down wi’ the pox. Captain had him thrown o’erboard.”

 _Affirmation_. If that doesn’t send a zap of hope shooting to her throat.

“Ma’am, we _have_ to go. Old Davey’s paler than death.”

When she bustles back through the tavern doors the revelry is shot to tatters. The jeering and laughter dies out to nothing but pained curses and a hushed rabble. Though, no one seems to have forgotten their tankards in the rush to congregate around the body on the floor.

She clutches her satchel with a tepid caution.

“Madame,” Lawrence splices from the fold. He’s flanked immediately by the man she now knows as Giles, still ruddy in complexion and sneering with hostility.

Her wrist still aches from the strain.

She takes one step back and Lawrence holds both hands up in concession, coddling her like some skittish animal.

“Now, we might have a proposition after all, _surgeon_.”

A rumble of disapproval circulates around the men, but no one dares to contradict Lawrence’s approach.

_A woman doctor?_

_World’s been seized by the devil._

She’s not here to negotiate and she makes that clear.

“Passage to Wilmington.”

A shadow of displeasure carves itself into Lawrence’s jaw. She knows it must pain him to renege on his earlier assertions, but the man lying on the floor proves to be someone more powerful than even the ship’s surgeon.

“Wilmington. No rations.”

The agreement calls for no further contract.

The switch flips and as if thrown back through the stones she begins ordering the clearance of the men, waving them off like flies from a corpse.

_Symptoms. Diagnose._

“Has he purged anything?”

“Aye, a tankard an’ ‘alf – thought he were gettin’ too old fer the drink.”

A splattered pool of sick catches in her peripheral.

“I hear they call you Old Davey,” she crouches down next to the liver-spotted man, contorted in pain, “no, no need to speak, just show me where the worst of it is.”

Knuckles calloused from seafaring tremble over an area by his navel.

_Abdominal pain and tenderness._

She lifts his shirt, confirming a suspicion at the raised knot protruding from the skin. Dr Levy cites it as one of the easiest and most common operations they will happen upon. She’s watched it countless times from the lecture hall, shadowed a case in the hospital…except she also knows hernias can strangulate.

Not that anything in this era will ever be able to verify that for her.

It’s a momentary battle of conscience, but they vow to take an oath by graduation and what difference does it make that she hasn’t yet received that certification? Old Davey convulses with another pained wail and that’s all it takes for her to command the room once more.

Tankards are finally settled to help hoist the withered seafarer onto one of the tavern tables.

She wrenches one of the surviving ales from a nearby table and uses it to disinfect the area around the hernia.

“Waste ‘o perfectly good grog that,” someone grumbles from behind.

“I need clean cloth,” she states, rummaging through her satchel for her first aid kit.

The tavern owner relinquishes a washed tablecloth for the spectacle of a surgery in his establishment. She’s subject to a theatre of eyes as she runs a razor blade from her kit through the body of a candle flame. While that cools off, she palpates the area as her mentors had shown her, desperately trying to drum up an exact method of pressure and depth she had not yet been able to determine for herself.

The crew seem to have been drinking since morning and Old Davey’s breath reeks of watered-down ale but alcohol won’t mask the searing slice through his abdomen.

“Four of you need to hold down his limbs. He’s going to want to fight the pain,” she urges the crowd. It takes little coaxing from the crew and as if she’d clicked her fingers, four burly characters clamp down on Old Davey’s extremities. In some ways, sailors are a little easier to convince than soldiers, she thinks.

She levels the blade against the strained skin with a momentary pause to subdue the encroaching shake of adrenaline.

The rest whirls by in a blur of clotted blood and cries muted by unconsciousness. Her tentative approach with the blade pays off and she manages to slice through the subcutaneous tissue without nicking the bowel.

Someone faints.

Her hands work rubied with blood into the abdominal cavity and efficiently tuck the hernia back behind the muscle wall. She scrapes clots and congealed fluids with her hands until she’s certain the cavity is rendered proper. It takes an ocean of guesswork but a natural proclivity for surgery under pressure undercuts any fear that lingers as she reaches for the her sewing kit.

The uneven stitch is not a match for her commercial sewing machine, but the skin seals clean and it’s all she can ask of herself for a first ditch attempt.

Later, aboard the ship they tell her that he is their navigator. Revered among the crew.

Old Davey _Lawrence_.

She’s afforded the Captain’s protection and despite the contract, a hearty supper of meat and potatoes falls into her lap as the ship cuts through the Atlantic.

One step closer to Brianna…even if it earns her another moniker.

_The Butcher._

_*_

She breathes her first unrestricted breath when Wilmington is declared from the scope of a spyglass.

Through a shroud of dense fog, they’re beckoned to dock by a handful of oil lamps flickering like drunken fireflies. The mood aboard the ship shifts and the bustling excitement for landfall slinks from bow to stern.

Her first steps onto one of the thirteen colonies lassoes any expectations she has and floods her with the mud-slick memory of the Scottish Highlands. It’s a marked change from the grainy infiltration of sand that she’s still pouring from her belongings.

Captain Lawrence makes no show of her departure, which in itself is gratitude enough as he lets her disembark without incident. Wilmington will be crawling with other medical guild dolts who will advocate for tobacco smoke to be blown up the arse.

Adrenaline drives her now.

Unauthorised surgery hasn’t stripped her reserves yet and she flits a keen eye over the town. A nine-year-old isn’t the best of company after a long and arduous journey, a fact she knows all too well. Brianna is strong-willed, but that doesn’t always bleed into compliance when deprived of sleep and her comforts.

_I want to go home, Mama._

It’s late and the town is winding down which puts a dampener on certain avenues of enquiry. The inn is her first target, followed by the local taverns and general stores. Mrs and Mrs Bug’s perception of Mr Myers is that he is a man of excess when it comes to his drink and his dinner.

_We were nay ter call him one ‘o the British. A Welshman born and bred._

A red-headed child accompanying a Welshmen ought to stir a few tales, shouldn’t it? That’s the hope that urges her door to door, through ale-wild crowds and vague remembrances.

_I may have…red you say? Maybe not, M’dear._

_Mrs Connell on the southside have a bunch ‘o redheaded ruffians; though, you’ll nay leave with the clothes on your back._

_Aye, I know a rotten Welshman who owes me a ‘alf. Came round here and emptied my pocket near a month ago. You ‘is wife?_

Each false trail grinds her down and erodes the fervour of hope.

She doesn’t want to concede to an inn as the night begins to curtain the streets. Another night of restless sleep seems so counterintuitive when the time could be spent elsewhere.

She takes stock across from a local blacksmith’s, momentarily entranced by the mirage of smoke and molten ember from the forge. It distracts her from the pain of chafing blisters and the oscillating exhaustion that curls around her joints.

Jamie’s ring sits heavy on her hand.

_Forged from the key to Lallybroch._

She doesn’t know whether she’s purposefully trying to find meaning now that she can exercise the freedom of her memory, but it helps like a salve. Wounds that have bled for a decade under the cover of darkness begin to scab. If only Frank knew the way to scrub the wild highlander wife from her would be to unchain her from his conditions.

To let her breathe.

But a wistful lament leads to carelessness.

The graze of brick against her temple is the first thing she feels before the lifted weight of her satchel. The throb of unexpected impact draws a curse from her as the tapering sounds of running slap against the mud in the distance.

A wet, rubious trail slithers down her cheek to mark the next act of time’s betrayal against her.

She won’t miss the practical things: a sewing kit for sutures, a bar of olive soap or the boracic lint. The things that make sense in a world devoid of modern-day invention fall wayside to a tattered candy box and a lone red sandal.

_Oh, Mama, I feel like Dorothy!_

There is nothing else 1756 can take.

It’s not instant, but the rebellion burns deep in her chest, as hot and molten as the forge. If there’s anything she’s learned about herself over time, it’s that she rarely complies with the expected.

And this world expects her to fall short.

She rises back to her feet, the mud and the blood caked like badges of merit in the threads of her dress. If history wants a fight she’ll surely rise to the challenge.

The shutters from the blacksmith’s pull shut and she takes that as her cue, pushing herself off the wall towards the direction of the last inn. The tacky squelches of her footfalls reverberate in the air, a hypnotic chorus of perseverance so engrossing that she almost misses it.

A raw, out-of-tune whistle that crawls into the recesses of her memory, clawing for some long-gone remembrance.

It stops her in her tracks.

_Because there's Kent and keen_

_And there's Aberdeen_

_And there's naan as muckle as the strath_

_Of boogie woogie._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Little things I discovered while researching:
> 
> *Dory – small, wooden fishing boat originating in the 18th century
> 
> *Begorra – By god.
> 
> *Bowsabella – Dishevelled woman (among other things)
> 
> * Milk the pigeon – Do the impossible.
> 
> Up next: A blowin' reveille. Hold onto your kilts, people. Also, a thank you to all of you who show love and support, be that a little kudos heart, a comment or a read. You make googling 18th century currency converting worth it (it's a thing, check the National Archives - £5 gets you a horse).


	4. Ghoistidh

_**1756** _

Coveting hope is a dangerous thing, she knows that.

The seeds sow and root into any fertile chamber of a heart left undefended, like dandelions birthing from between the cracks of concrete. If watered and nourished, the violent yellow blooms can subdue even the darkest midnight hour.

_Because there’s kent and keen._

But hope is as delicate as the opalescent film of a bubble.

When it detonates it scatters with a savage disregard for the verdant garden, clipping and uprooting the flora like common garden weeds.

_And there’s Aberdeen._

She dares not turn.

For there is a hope she does not speak of, one that visits her as often as earth completes a revolution around the sun. It buoys a timeworn consideration for an outcome other than the bloody massacre back on the fields of Culloden. 

Hope for _survival_. 

Though for the pain it inevitably brings, she doesn’t much think of it as hope. 

All rationale spurs her to carry onward to the inn and towards Brianna; self-preservation has been her defence mechanism of choice since Frank and the doctors in Inverness toyed with psychiatric intervention. Despite the indescribable losses and the depths of an abyss that threatened to hold her hostage until graveside, she had moved forward.

One step in front of the other. Boston. Brianna. Harvard.

But this is one step she can’t possibly take.

_And there's naan as muckle as the strath of boogie-woogie._

There’s one last sheaf of time left to guillotine and all it asks for is one confrontation, to pull the bobbled fibre and potentially unspool a decade’s worth of belief.

The notion of _possibility_ thrashes against her breastbone in a staccato rhythm so powerful it strips her of air.

A trembling hand rises to the plain of her chest to comfort the full-throttle cadence of her heartbeat. If she turns, if her memory betrays the recall, she risks yet another cataclysmic blow to the fortress she’s made around 1746.

She hasn’t much faith left that she can comfortably survive another defeat.

But knowledge is also power in its own right.

As much as the past has wrought from her hands, _she_ had been the one to sever the complete ties when she promised Frank total compliance. If she had let it speak, what could history have told her?

 _Who_ could she have found?

_A-root, a-toot, a rooty-a-doot._

Something otherworldly yet contrasting to the power of the stones teases her resolve. A slick pirouette on the rain-logged earth and what 1756 taketh, it does in equal parts giveth with a frightening rapidity. 

In the ink of night, her perception is a little askew and a fraction biased looking for confirmation of the most extraordinary happenstance, but the side profile briefly illuminated by the glow of a lamp arrests her. 

And with it kindles the memory of a Gaelic endearment she hasn’t heard since Culloden.

_Ghoistidh._

A euphoria so powerful that it licks at the heels of Brianna’s birth almost fells her. His name clogs in her throat, strangulated by the torrent of cinematic fiction she has conjured over the years to lay his memory to rest. It purges from the depths like an eruption, spreading the ashes of mourning to the wind until euphoria is all she has left.

_I thought my heart was gonna burst._

She considers it an act of fate that time entwines their destinies so close after her crossings, her saviour from Black Jack Randall in the Highlands and now a man in her colonial storm.

As if magnetised by the electricity of her emotions, he pauses gathering scrap alloys and ingots, drawn by her dusk-shadowed presence in the street. 

“Are ye alright, Lass?”

She must look mad; non-verbal and wavering between a sprint or a five-foot drop to the floor. There’s an ocean of words brimming on her lips but the dam of disbelief curtails anything she could say. 

“Lassie?”

Two leather boots creep out from under the lamplight, shuffling a wiry frame weathered by years of misfortune into view. 

Once a man of dark walnut features, her eternally static image of him shifts to consume the elder version that has been privileged to see another decade. Unkempt brown tresses that lived under a bunnet have been replaced by argent strands, pulled away from rosacea cheeks into a groomed ponytail.

Concern draws from the same motherly well she reserves for Brianna, for the shadow of the man she had known at the height of her Highlander life.

Time has not been kind to him. 

Whether it’s a question, some kind of affirmation or a bleeding-heart worry, she finally finds her voice and his name with a tremulous exhale.

_“Murtagh?”_

Even shrouded by evening she can interpret the furrow of his heavy-set brow. The same whirring cogs set in motion, urging him to give the Sassenach accent greater consideration, just as their jingle had for her. 

The canyon of time between them begins to recede as he absorbs the situation and finally _looks_ at her, searching for confirmation that his mind hasn’t gone senile. His lips part and bob with a fish-like shock, as akin to her own stupor as she can imagine in the middle of Wilmington’s deserted streets. For a man as hard to read as Murtagh, even he can’t stifle the onslaught that her existence in this time brings.

The rasp of his next words belies the self-confidence she remembers him for.

“Tell me yer no’ a spirit.”

With a shake of her head and the waterlogged joy breaching the dams of her eyes it’s all he needs to quell his incertitude.

The smile that traverses from cheek to cheek is one that she can’t hold back as fleeting throwbacks to _La Dame Blanche_ tease from cobwebbed corners of her mind. It’s a smile as organic and heartfelt as any she’s gifted onto Brianna’s new-born crown, a joy that permeates from head to toe and infects him with the same elation.

Though, confusion remains a discernible undercurrent.

_How? Why?_

They’re matters best left for more private chambers and the why is swept aside in favour of a chest-thumping embrace. As treasured as her own Uncle Lamb, Murtagh’s kinship runs deep with fondness and carries a loyalty and trust only second to Jamie’s. She melds herself against his frame and breathes in a soot-infused inhale at his shoulder, the weight and strain of her journey cleaving off like slate from a rockfall.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” she muffles a tattered sob into a frayed patch on his coat, still struggling to process the upheaval of his survival.

“And yer supposed to be in the twentieth century,” Murtagh returns with equal sobriety in his gruffness. A comforting hand stations on her back and oscillates a mellow warmth into her spine.

Part of her is too terrified to release the embrace in fear she’s been fooled or lost her own mind. From the shock on Ocracoke to the proceeding day’s turbulence it would make sense if she’s disassociating; the mind has a beautiful way of protecting itself in situations of extreme stress.

“T’was the song, wasn’t it?”

“I _told_ you it works,” she pulls away from him with a waterlogged smile, comforted that he won’t combust into thin air, “and it travelled the seas; North Carolina?”

“Aye, a fair sight different than a kilt and dirk that’s fer sure,” he motions to the breeches and waistcoat layered under his leather apron, “take my tartan and dress me up like a mutton fandan.”

His surliness is something not even the colonists can strip from him. 

“I daresay, I hope this trade is more profitable than your god-awful Ghillie Callum,” she flicks her attention to the forge and then back up to him for the reaction she knows it will draw. 

A raucous peel of laughter pulls from his belly and off sluffs a layer of unease, reeling back the natural power of their friendship. A shutter from a nearby house creaks and the mood shifts, prompting Murtagh to take action with a grunt of annoyance.

“As miracle as ye are, Claire, we canna sit in the street or folks’ll start talkin’,” he warns and ushers her to wait a moment while he returns to lock away the remaining few blacksmithing tools. 

The reunion cuts itself short and he leads her down a darker, unlit alley beside the main smithery. The throb in her temple from the mugging is background noise and the looming threats seem a little less daunting now that she’s in familiar company. He guides her to a dilapidated shack only marginally bigger than an outhouse and produces a key for the half-fixed lock on the main door. 

“Isna much, a wee warmer than the cave, but I ken ye’ve seen worse.”

Murtagh has never been a man of great fancy in her lifetime, and the warning seems unnecessary until she’s finally facing the meagre offerings from the interior.

_Oh, Murtagh._

The life he’s traded in the Highlands for America is no better than the abandoned farmhouses and caves in Scotland. For as much weather on his face and body, the shelter - if she can call it that - shows more hardship. She’s seen trenches forged from scraps and dirt clods that are more accommodating. 

Mould and mildew climb from the dampened corners of rotting wood, accompanied by the scratchings and scuttling of beasts she used to collect for remedies in Leoch. One cot, a shelf and a trunk are all that differentiate it from Reverend Wakefield’s potting shed.

She _has_ seen worse, in both of her lifetimes, but it doesn’t make the picture any easier to swallow.

“Part ‘o my indenture,” Murtagh explains for the benefit of her ill-concealed disquiet, tasking himself with the lamp brought from the forge, “transferred tae the colonies from prison after Hogmanay.” 

A thousand questions hang in the air between them once the oil lamp hangs to illuminate the space; the silence seeps back in with a pressing weight she’s sure neither of them is ready to face. In the years that she had known Murtagh they had often found cause to butt heads and rail against each other’s ideas, as comfortable in their fractious disharmony as in moments of agreeableness. There was once a time she could stand toe to toe with Murtagh and wheedle her will from him, even if it stood against his better judgement.

They had never found cause in their relationship to be as caged as they are now.

For both of them have questions and answers that have been swept into some dark corner with no means to revisit them. 

A damp cloth is pressed into her hands in the midst of her musing and Murtagh reminds her of the injury.

“Oh… thank you,” she utters, still a little discombobulated from the carousel of events. They each find purchase on either end of the cot, separated by a mere few feet, yet the span of two hundred years lodges itself between them like a grenade.

“Did someone do that to ye?” Murtagh asks, a protectiveness emanating from the clenched knot of his jaw as she palpates the area near her brow. 

“Not intentionally,” she shrugs, the whole thing so inconsequential to her now, “my satchel was the target.”

She pads the cloth to her skin and checks for a decrease in bloody output. The wound seems to have congealed for the time being and won’t need much more attention, which is a relief considering her first aid kit is probably languishing in some boggy ditch. The satchel alone is worth more than its contents so she knows the efforts to relieve it from her will have been for nought.

The distraction of her injury peters off and she toys with the cloth as the quiet descends upon them once again. In another world she might have the time to dance around the situation and approach it with the delicacy it calls for. With every drawn-out minute she falls short of her duty to Brianna, no matter the magnitude of the discovery at hand.

Always one to circle back to the crux of the issue, Murtagh senses the drift and steers the conversation back on track.

“Are ye alone?”

She detects a certain gravity in that question and for a moment she wonders if he’s known all this time. She hadn’t told anyone about the baby, or rather her suspicion surrounding her condition, not even when Jamie had outright diagnosed her himself. There hadn’t been any time in between Culloden and Craigh Na Dun and she very much doubted that Jamie had found cause to share the joyous news on the battlefield.

But there’s a yearning that emanates in the glassy anticipation boring at her from carob eyes. 

“No and yes,” she admits, a tempered smile curling and then waning at the corner of her mouth, “up until yesterday I was in the twentieth century, but then there was an accident with my daughter.”

And there it is, a pride-rich validation creeping into his features extinguishes a long unanswered curiosity.

“Ye’ve a lass?”

She nods her head, her own pride welling behind the relief of being able to share that with _family._ As tenuous as it may be, Murtagh has Fraser blood and it’s the closest she’ll ever come to sharing Brianna with her Highlander heritage. Not to mention the closest thing Brianna will ever have to a grandparent.

“Brianna,” she confirms for him, “ _Brianna_ _Ellen_.”

If there was any doubt about her parentage or the timeline that quickly quashes it. She can almost envision the two ivory boar tusks plated with silver swimming in his mind’s eye. Frank had never questioned the significance of the names that had rolled off her tongue the moment the nurse had asked, and the satisfaction of her choice isn’t validated until now, as Murtagh floods with pride.

He doesn’t have to say it for her to feel it. _Jamie would be honoured._

The moment is quickly displaced with concern. There’s one giant rift between a vacation and time travel to 1756.

“There was an accident?” Murtagh prompts, mindful of her threadbare composure.

“I was in Boston and Brianna’s fa- _Frank_...,” she struggles to reconcile that relationship with Murtagh, “he took her to North Carolina; they go on a trip every summer so I can study and work. I didn’t _know_ , otherwise I would have moved to the bloody West Coast…she went through a stone circle on Ocracoke,” she drops her face to her hands, massaging the butts of her palms over her eye sockets to relieve the tired ache.

The whole mess is still so raw.

Murtagh’s face grows ashen as it dawns on him, “the lass is _here?”_

Failure grips her throat again and all she can do is nod or else lose all composure. The fact that she’s still so far from where she thought she would be cuts deep. It was all supposed to end with a terrifying close call, a few uneasy questions and answers, before soothing the unrest with a chapter of _Moby Dick_ and curling up for the night in Brianna’s twin bed. 

Oh, how she longs to watch her smile in her sleep while running a finger down the speckled ridge of her nose. 

The tale pours from her like a slashed bag of grain. Unlike Mrs Bug, Claire can openly and honestly lay out every detail she can remember to Murtagh. Ocracoke and the passage to Wilmington pretzel together in their shared trials and tribulations, of lost sandals, tavern surgery and the trail for a highly regarded yet equally concerning Welsh trader.

Murtagh lends her an ear, pensive throughout, waiting for an opportunity to latch onto a detail that might set the trail afire once more. He doesn’t _ken_ Ocracoke and his indenture keeps him on a tight leash, so John Quincy Myers isn’t someone he’s had the opportunity to cross.

Her heart sinks a little further at that.

“Brianna…I’d wager she’s a braw wee thing. Wi’ you fer her mother and the lad…ye ken she was born fer this land?”

Brianna _is_ stronger than most conventional nine-year-olds. She knows that without a shadow of a doubt. Despite the promises she made in Inverness, a trepidation fuelled by the inexplicable highlander apparition back on their second honeymoon still haunts Frank. Fearful of some force, whether that be a figure from her mother’s past or an intangible calling to the stones, Frank had taken every precaution to prepare Brianna for Highland life. She could thread a fishing line and bait a salmon before she even started Kindergarten, or kindle a fire and hunt rabbit before blowing out the candles on her seventh birthday cake.

For all her strengths, and as proud as she is of the fierce young girl, she’s still a child who nestles up to her stuffed rabbit when a storm blows in from the coast. It’s hard to reconcile genealogy and adaptability when the child in question pretends not to need a nightlight, only for it to be glowing from behind the crack of her door during a night-time check.

Murtagh’s words are an attempt at balming the wounds of her guilt but they still fall short in preventing the internal deluge.

“I did this to her, and now I’m failing her…and failing _him_. I promised I would keep her safe, but no matter what I bloody do there’s _always_ something dragging us back.”

Try as she might once in Boston, there were a hard-few years spent detangling the highlander threads from her American life. She lived and breathed the conditions to honour the promise Frank had made to raise her child, but even with her best efforts the yarn was far too knotted. The past called on her in every way imaginable. Taunting. A sparrow on her windowsill. The russet peach fuzz on her baby’s head. Effusive apologies from Mr Glaspie, the Scotsman who knocks Brianna over in the street with his car. Joe _Abernathy._ As much as she tried to Americanise and scrub Scotland from her pores, it found ways to infiltrate and worm its way back with a growing ferocity.

And now the stones had called her daughter.

She’s curled back into Murtagh’s shoulder before she can even unleash the dam.

_I’m sorry… I can’t bear it._

“S’alright, Lass, we’ll get her back. A few folk owe a smithy some favours, though it’ll be a push for a mare or two.”

That pulls her back as though yanked.

“You can’t,” she implores him, a lightning bolt of fear scarpering up her back, “your indenture.”

They’d hunt him into the ground.

“It hasna been fairin’ me well, if ye can’t see it fer yerself,” Murtagh brushes her off, a freshly lit fire burning in his eyes, “and ye ken better than most how to survive as an outlaw. Spent a few years avoidin’ the redcoats did we no?”

She eyes the scar tissue formed into a ‘T’ on the back of his right hand, always a man of risk and honour despite what the brand implies. She can’t ask more of him when he seems to have barely escaped their last war with little more than his life.

“Boston is near a three-month ride if ye don’t catch her trail before the next rain,” he warns, “and I’ll place coin that ye ken what’s happenin’ in these parts between the British and the French. Ye’ll no get far wi’ yer foul mouth an’ healin’ when yer surrounded by th’ highway men or Indians.”

_Remember, yer still a woman._

The urge to roll her eyes is stifled by the truth in his argument. While she has never been fearful of throwing her own weight around, her tracking skills and gender are veritable sticks in the mud. She’s hard-headed and stubborn but she’s also not stupid. _Contrary_ to what people thought of her in the lead up to Wentworth.

Her lack of fight is confirmation enough for him, as much as that burns her pride to cinders.

“If we go, we go tonight,” he urges, gathering the little he possesses and stuffing it all into a holdall fashioned from a discoloured shirt, “by the time the law come slinkerin’ we’ll be near tae Cape Fear. Any trader who kens his business won’t dare pass it by.”

“You know the way?” she asks. As a Scotsman born and bred, Murtagh had the advantage of knowing the highlands like the back of his hand, but Hogmanay is only six months past and for as long as she has lived stateside, she’s needed some form of map outside Boston.

“Barker, the smithin’ master trades fer iron at the river; past few runs he’s taken me fer the liftin’. I ken enough.”

A creeping doubt settles in her gut over their haste. She hasn’t ruled out the far side of town or finished her enquiries and the regret of leaving a trail unfinished will chew her insides up.

She spits it out.

“What if they’re still in town?”

“Wilmington is a port toon, ye think a ship docks and the town ain’t talkin’? If ye’ve made yer inquiries sae far as the smith and ye’ve not caught tail of Quincey or Brianna, they’ve rode on,” he shrugs, balling a cloth around a stale hunk of bread.

“It’s a New World, Lass, but it’s the same ole natter. Ye’ll already be on the tongues of nebby folk, and knowin’ yer temper Claire, it’ll be colourful language I’m sure.”

“You know, when I mourned you, I forgot your _charming_ disposition.”

“Aye, and I never forgot the sharpness of yer mouth.”

The gaiety of the moment lightens her some and she knows that when the time comes, this’ll be one of the hardest things she’ll leave behind.

It’s a thought she banishes with a bitter resentment.

A scrap of tartan nailed to the far wall catches her attention as Murtagh ties the final knot on his makeshift knapsack. It’s nothing but a moth-eaten fragment tattered with wear, but it hangs proudly against the backdrop of poverty.

_Fraser tartan._

It’s as much as a modern-day family portrait over a hearth. 

“Saved it by puttin’ it up my snoot,” Murtagh explains proudly, catching her stare, “the redcoats ain’t in the business of triflin’ wi another man’s sniffer.”

Even if it is but a mere scrap it levels her all the same, another piece that survives the bloodbath of the rebellion. The forced smile flashes and then wipes itself clean when the image of Jamie draped in his own Fraser tartan hurls itself at her.

“Ye havna asked.”

It’s not hard to determine what he means. _Who_ he means.

“I don’t think I can bring myself to.”

Of anyone left after Culloden, Murtagh is the only one she can’t bear to detail the ins and outs of her husband’s savage demise. She’d rather hear it from a damn Redcoat than from a loved one; _James “Red Jamie” Fraser, killed in action_. Her own pain is already too much of a burden to carry and she can’t possibly shoulder Murtagh’s alongside her own.

She’s grieved and torn herself to rags enough that it doesn’t quite hurt so much as it did in the beginning. That’s something bearable she can almost live with.

“I dinna understand…ye said in yer own time ye’ve ways to look back on the past?”

“Hmm,” she murmurs in agreement, “records and transcriptions. I did for a while, until I thought my fingers would bleed with all the page turning, and the endless searching for names that were never _important_ enough for history. They made very little of the men who died for their cause. If I’d have known about you…”

“I ken ye know I don’t mean myself, Lass.”

The tension shifts in tone.

Whether she’s ready for it or not, Murtagh grabs the grenade with both hands, kneeling before her with a solemnity of a priest.

“I see it wrought into ye like salt and iron, this pain that doesna run dry. I ken ye’ll be on yer way when the wean is safe, back to the life where food isna scarce an’ the world is easier, but ye dinna have to suffer yerself to an early grave.”

“You make it sound like I have a choice,” she snaps back, tired of the same old lecture she’s given herself.

She’s never had the _choice_ ; that’s always been pried and ripped from her.

“I once told ye that ye weren’t the only one to lose someone ye loved,” Murtagh reminds her, “and ye ken the love I had fer Ellen. That’s a pain I’ll take ter my grave.”

“And mine isn’t?” she knows the men in her life can be ill-spoken, but there’s a thread here that she’s just not catching onto.

She’s spared no time to brace for the impact.

And in goes the grenade.

“Jamie isna dead, Claire. He survived Culloden.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I warred with myself about this particular revelation so early in the plot. It took a lot of consideration and I couldn't find a reasonable excuse why Murtagh would let Claire suffer through that anguish unnecessarily. So, the plot built around that for the future chapters. 
> 
> Sorry for the grenade. Take cover.


	5. Faith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a little while, hasn't it? I don't pretend like this is drawing a huge crowd, but for anyone who looked out for last week's update, I'm sorry if it was a disappointment. A wonderful, last minute opportunity fell into my lap and it demanded my entire week which meant I had to delay the schedule for this. No regrets, because the opportunity is now all mine and it paid off! 
> 
> From here on out you can expect an update every Monday to cement the update schedule. If anyone reads to music or even writes to music "Irish Sea" by Solomon Grey absolutely ruled the tone for this.
> 
> *TW: This chapter involves a potential miscarriage* The bookends are "stew and potatoes" and "Claire! Darling!" so please use these to navigate if needed.

**_October 10 th, 1948_ **

**_Boston_ **

_“Parsimonious behaviour.”_

_That’s the crime Frank accuses her of today._

_An early morning meditation flourishes into a puff of consternation the moment she shifts out of bed, circumventing the soft drift of fingertips that trespass along the swell jutting from her hips. They thump to the bed, clenched into a fist as she shuffles into her housecoat and slippers, not deterred that dawn hasn’t quite risen._

_Oftentimes she’s made aware of some acute friction stirring across her midsection, independent from the wayward thrust of limbs missiled from the life growing within her. The caresses are usually born at night when closed eyes and shallow breaths diminish the likelihood of her withdrawal._

_But today she feels it in total wakefulness and it sears like a hot iron brand against her skin. She doesn’t revel in the cruelty of her neglect, in fact, her avoidance is as painful as the intrusion of the hand that wields a pen over a sword. The canyon of time between her and Frank is bridged by the most tenuous rope these days, though they do their utmost best to keep it maintained. Some days, she forgets to hold on as tightly as those before._

_The tone is set for the day in her retreat and with it comes an avalanche of discord._

_She burns the toast and splits the yolk on a fried egg whilst jibing with Frank over the Lipton teabags. There’s no orange pekoe leaf tea again, and that’s another strike against her because he’d reminded her on Tuesday to pick it up from the grocers._

_These are the moments she allows between her and Frank. Inconsequential squabbles to glaze over the glacial indifference she bears towards him and everyone around her. Even if they can’t rekindle their passion as man and wife, they find an outlet in domestic disputes. It’s not the healthiest coping mechanism by any means, but it tempers the otherwise growing resentment between them._

_Him for doing the right thing by her._

_Her for letting him._

_When Frank leaves for work he wrenches the door shut with a veritable slam, upending the perch of her favourite craquelure vase. She hears the crash of porcelain from over the spitting hiss of the sink and sighs bitterly, catching herself on the precipice of hormonal tears._

_The vase had been the one heartfelt purchase she’d made for their home. It might not have stood centre stage to the Broadway play of their lives, but it gave her pause and appreciation amongst the other props._

_She’s on her hands and knees with a dustpan and brush, shepherding the fragments into a pile when the baby decides to curl a foot under her rib._

_“Not you too,” she exhales through a hiss. The pain manifests like a stitch and even breathing exacerbates the sharp, piercing sensation. It strikes her there in the hallway, that this sensation is more powerful than any she felt with Faith. These movements wind and tear at her with a hearty ferocity of eight months worth of health. She drops the dustpan and roves a palm over the curve of her abdomen, suddenly enthralled by the distinction._

_Today, this child is older than its sister ever got to be._

_What should fissure through her in a burst of unadulterated joy falls flat like a deflated balloon. The only person who could understand the magnitude of such a feat, for the wondrous miracle that is this child’s health and existence, moulders in his own untimely grave. As remarkable as the progression of her pregnancy is, sometimes she hates this child. It’s one of her darkest and most guilt-sodden truths that will live in the deep recesses of her mind, never to fall from her lips._

_Faith’s passing had torn her and Jamie apart in unimaginable ways, yet it had also drawn them back together like the moon toys with the tide against the shore._

_This child...this child has torn them asunder._

_The lump in her throat is hard to dislodge, but she clears the hall and tosses the remnants of a treasured purchase in the bin to join the eggs and toast. Distraction establishes itself in her wifely domestic duties; darning Frank’s socks to the rhythm of the grandfather clock; scrubbing the refrigerator with Ajax to get rid of that ghastly spoiled milk stench; and rinsing the linoleum with a baking soda wash._

_Backache and heartburn run rampant through her on the way to the grocers. Molly Campbell, the human embodiment of heartburn - in her own gracious opinion- is unavoidable in the aisle for tea._

_“Mrs Randall, you’re glowing!”_

_Bristling, she offers a curt “thank you” and reaches for the Twining’s tin to place in her basket. Today is not one of those days where she can sustain the onslaught of mundane Americana scandals. Molly, however, is rarely deterred by her chronic apathy, forever accepting it as some British dryness of personality._

_“I did hear something wildly concerning just this past week.”_

_“I’m sure you have,” she returns with cutting disinterest, barely catching the automatic urge to roll her eyes. The younger housewife seems entirely oblivious to the sarcastic lilt of her tone and finds no pause in her tale._

_“Millie Nelson, number one-twenty-eight, two doors down from you? Well, she tells me she had to help you carry half a felled forest into your living room, and in your condition! She said you cooked a roast chicken in your fireplace? Where do you get these rustic ideas?”_

_The whole bloody street hasn’t been able to keep her off their lips since she moved into the neighbourhood. Like a reoccurring rash, gossip and snippets of her domestic adventures -fuelled by the freedom of her eighteenth-century life- filter back to Frank and other inhabitants of the street like wildfire._

_Her hope that Frank would find their wood-fire dinner amusing was doused by yet another tepid disagreement._

_“If the stove is playing up you can call a repairman to visit within the hour, Boston is crawling with them, Claire. Why do you insist on making life that much harder for yourself?”_

_The Highlands don’t scrub from her as easily as she imagines, and each misplaced step is scrutinised as though she’s been drawn from some feral life raised by wolves._

_And she’s never to talk of it._

_“…Marty would have had my hide if I’d dared such ruthless tasks while –,”_

_Her patience wears thin and she finds her attention tuning out of Molly’s frequency. The baby manoeuvres into an entirely uncomfortable position and the basket full of sundries digs into the crook of her arm, initiating an aching cramp. The stifling wave of modernity piques at unconscionable zeniths less frequently than she anticipates, but when these moments befall her, she can rarely cement herself to face the lashing it brings._

_The wicker basket falls from her arm with an unceremonious crash, rolling tins and jars across the floor like a disturbed nest of skittering beetles in Cairo. It’s the last thought she has before patience gives way to flight and her key is twisting in the ignition of her Packard Sedan._

_The bloody orange pekoe leaf tea and Molly Campbell’s vexation fizzle to a background hum as she steps out onto the path circling Jamaica Pond. When her own timeline serves too much at once she finds solace in The Emerald Necklace, away from the bustle of modern invention. For as little time she spent roving over hills and glens compared to the years she spent in the twentieth century, the yearning for open space and foliage to spite the Bostonian concrete jungle, begs for her acquiescence. Boston’s parks are a mere stand in for the Scottish glades but they fill the void enough to satiate the pining._

_Rollicking limbs settle to the sway of sea kelp in a lulled ocean current as she finds purchase on a bench. A modicum of peace settles over her and she pays a silent thank you to the child, smoothing her right hand under the layers of her swagger coat and over the swell. Some days the modern world is more exhausting than the days spent riding from town to town by horse and camping in frigid conditions._

_Jamie would find her comparison laughable._

_Ye come from a place where things are easier, I think._

_Oh, how wrong that sentiment could turn out to be. The Lallybroch ring sands against the taught cotton of her chemise, warming her third finger with the friction. Just as Jamie had dared not ask her to remove the gold band on her left ring finger, Frank had married into the same notion just as silently regarding the ring on her right._

_As tenuous as the thread between her and Frank, the Lallybroch ring is the closest she can bring the child to the father, separated between two hundred years and the planes of life and death. Though she does not talk about it, she hopes that whatever spiritual force brought her to Jamie in the first place can traverse the sentiment between them: thirty-six weeks strong; your rival in wayward night-time kicks and just as ungraceful in the delivery; a wee, braw bairn as strong as any Murray progeny seen through time._

_A chill seeps into the air as the park is invaded by cloud cover, signalling an end to the respite. She makes it home just before the heavens open, spilling and spitting from the sky in torrential globules. Whilst Faith had been born in the Parisian spring, her second will be born into the bitter cold of a Bostonian winter. At least, in this century she has the luxury of a furnace and post-natal care that outstrips anything she could have had back in Lallybroch._

_Stew and potatoes boil away on the stove top and she takes a moment to relieve herself for the umpteenth time that day, feeling rather like a horse than someone expecting._

_Only then in the bathroom does she associate the all-day twinge in her back with a tremulous fear, eyes trained on the stark crimson splotches stained in her undergarments._

_She has grown too comfortable and now the world chooses to smite her for the folly._

_Two wars. The loss of her child. Two husbands, one taken to his grave. Hasn’t she paid a price too unconscionable to raise?_

_Time shifts in a zoetrope flicker, a carousel of splintered moments whirling from a white-knuckled drive to the emergency room and into the sterility of a triage bay. If she manages any semblance of coherency through the lead-heavy shock she remembers nought of it, only the clammy hand glued to her midriff, poised to capture any sign of movement. Relegated to a bed and gown she allows the assortment of diagnostic tools to infiltrate and shred every last tatter of dignity she has._

_“Don’t worry, Mrs. Randall.”_

_She reminds the nurse of her past medical history to prove the hollowness of such positivity. Of her Faith, or lack thereof._

_“Where is your husband, Mrs. Randall?”_

_Someone splits from the bustle of medical personnel to telephone Harvard as the male physician scans her with an awkward trepidation, offset by the lack of a male correspondent._

_She reminds him that she was a combat nurse for the British Army._

_“You show signs of marginal placental previa, Mrs. Randall. Once your husband is here, we can discuss your treatment plan. The child is stable.”_

_When time’s velocity anchors back to a normal metre, her tunnel vision focus expands to allow the flood of barricaded emotion. Whilst some trickle and others wash over her in waves, guilt brandishes every weapon attainable and aims straight for her heart._

_How dare you find cause to hate something once torn from you._

_“God says we must revel in mercy, tread sins underfoot… and hurl inequities into the sea.”_

_No apology can ever unwrite the thoughts borne from darkness._

_From wet, salted lips she whispers them anyway, siphoning every ounce of love and desire she’s felt towards the child since Culloden, mentally dispensing it with every protective caress over the taut skin._

_That’s how Frank finds her, reverently disavowing every impure thought and intention that has wheedled its way into her mindset since April._

_“Claire! Darling!”_

_She readily accepts the arms that hasten to curl around her, and Frank’s starched shirt collar dampens from the pearly dewdrops that haven’t yet found cause to cease. An infusion of pipe tobacco and a perfumed scent she doesn’t recognise from her own collection strikes her as she calms her breaths in the crook of his neck._

_Now is not the time, nor the place._

_Her physician is far more amenable in Frank’s presence, divulging the concerns and limitations of placental previa. Though she’s already considered high-risk, her diagnosis is marginal and with strict bed rest for the last period of her pregnancy she can undertake the rest at home. Strictly no duties and no exercising beyond bathroom breaks._

_In the privacy of their car, the day-stewed gripes from earlier that morning are forgiven over the radio crackle of Vivaldi. Tension whittles from her shoulders when she regales him with her tale of Molly Campbell in Orwell’s grocers, admitting her purposeful abandonment in replacing the tea leaf._

_“I’ll be sure to apologise to Mr Pike when I see him,” Frank assures, “though I think his proclivity for forgiveness is all but guaranteed when it concerns Mrs Campbell and her mouth.”_

_She smiles at that, bridging the divide between them once again. He tries in spite of her behaviour._

_“Are you certain you’re okay?” Frank asks, gingerly reaching a hand over to caress her knee for a few tender moments._

_“Still a little shaken,” she admits, her right arm still curled around herself in a protective vice._

_“We’ll see this baby through,” Frank promises, momentarily switching his focus from the road to her, eyes brimming with sincerity, “even if it means rolling my sleeves up and braving the roast dinner myself.”_

_“You know, maid services are just as abundant in Boston as repairmen? I know you weren’t a fan of the smoked chicken, but I draw the line at coal.”_

_The ghost of a laugh lingers somewhere between them, treading a humour they once shared in droves before Craigh Na Dun._

_When they cut a left onto their street a commotion of red flashes and crowded onlookers re-engages the panic button; a claret fire engine blocks half the street and is mounted against the curb outside their home._

_“What the devil…,” Frank blanches, lunging over the steering wheel for a better view._ _He parks with a jolt and she can see Millie Nelson and her husband Jerry watching the scene with a bug-eyed fascination, hands clamped to their mouths._

_She clambers from the car on Frank’s coattails and an acrid burning smell assaults her as they near the house._

_Her stomach lurches._

_“The stew!” she bursts, the growl of hunger in her gut triggering the memory of her abandoned efforts._

_“Jesus Christ, Claire!” Frank jostles past her, stalking towards the band of firefighters._

_For the second time that night the events churn into a disjointed panic, compounded by a flurry of activity and harried shouting. To her utter embarrassment the street learns of her mishap, only serving to add to her chronicles of failure as smoking, bottomless pans are discarded on her front lawn._

_It’s a miracle only the stove and her cookware are victims of her negligence. At least, that’s what a firefighter warns her on departure, casting his own severe judgement at her for the avoidable mess._

_She’s all but ordered to sit on the chaise in the study whilst Frank aerates the house, propping every window and shutter open to disperse the smoke. His distant curses fall wayside to her own internal chastisement, dredging up past Parisian anxieties. Though, this time there are no apostle spoons or tender encouragements to assure that all of this will fall into place._

_She has but a handful of mismatched jigsaw pieces and nowhere to lay them._

_How can she be someone’s mother when she’s living half her life in another century and burning down the house in the other? With Jamie at her side, coddling Murray babies and murmuring Gaelic sentiments to Kitty by the waning embers of the fire, the impending challenge of parenthood had seemed so manageable. Now she exists in a fractured partnership, of blind leading the blind in a world she doesn’t truly want to live in._

_Her eyes rove over the panelled alcoves of Frank’s monstrous library, tempting her with volumes of assorted Scottish history that had been shipped over from London. It all sits before her, as ready to be ravaged as any tome she tore from Reverend Wakefield’s shelves after her return from Culloden. The urge to know, to truly know if she has to suffer this life without Jamie tempts her more so now on the brink of motherhood, than any time in her history._

_There’s plenty of material to analyse during the lonely hours when Frank is otherwise working or entertaining department heads. All she needs is one afternoon here or there to sift through the gold embossed spines. As if supportive of this renewed compulsion, the child in her womb thumps her heartily from within._

_What if…?_

_It’s a notion that loses momentum the moment Frank’s footfalls echo against the hardwood floor. He pauses at the door jamb, leaning against the wood with a cup and saucer balanced in one hand, “a peace offering,” he murmurs, motioning to the drink._

_“I’m surprised the stove can still boil water,” she challenges him. From the smell of the charred strew she hadn’t much hope for the stove’s functionality._

_“Just the back ring,” Frank puffs out a sigh and hands her the saucer, “I’ll make some calls to appliance stores tomorrow.”_

_She’s surprised by the malty sweetness of orange pekoe as she takes a sip, a smile forming at the corners of her mouth._

_“When did you...after all of this?”_

_He plays it off with a quiet nonchalance, drifting further into the room until level with her at the chaise. She doesn’t expect him to fall at her knees, crumpled and weary as though the straw on the camel’s back had finally broken, but he does. Her free hand settles gingerly over his head, as tentative as his comfort back in the car._

_“We can do better than this,” he vows, meeting her gaze, “better than the insipid fighting and careless disregard for one another.”_

_For a fraction of a second her peripheral vision flits to the library, but it’s a short-lived fuse as her fingers sail from Frank’s crown and down the plane of a tense jaw; h_ _er unintended cruelty can be a poison._

_She had once loved this man._

_“We can,” she assures, finally wrought from temptation, “and we will.”_

_The sigh that escapes Frank is a tempered rejoice._

_It’s the last time she ever considers disavowing the promise she makes, to search through the annals of time for the faintest of reference._

S _he finally lays him to rest._

_*_

**_Wilmington, North Carolina_ **

**_1756_ **

_Jamie isna dead, Claire._

They’re the words that knit into her dreams and bathe her restless soul, only to set a series of landmines that eviscerate the honeyed balm of fantasy upon waking.

The reality _always_ remains the same even if she prays and wills for just one to materialise as truth. 

She doesn’t remember the last time her unconscious betrays her in that manner. After Brianna’s birth, life is inundated with the calamities of motherhood and her medical degree. The torment of being prised from Jamie isn’t something that can easily be forgotten, but elementary school science projects, dinners with the boss and girl scout meetings leave next to no room for pining. 

Each successive year becomes a little easier, for her daughter salves over the cracks and chips of things she has lost. When she gets used to the copper penny hair and smiles in sleep, she learns to view the parallels as kindred spirits. It takes the sting out of seeing her precocious daughter win the Fraser genetic lottery, even down to the bowed curve of her wrist and the strong pulse to rival his. 

When the twin beds in the master bedroom arrive to signal the end of the ‘ _we tried’_ era, the dreams ramp up in frequency. No longer able to channel the desire that leaves her breathless and wanting in the late hours with Frank, she’s left to war with frighteningly lucid dreams that _almost_ convince her that she’s traversed back to Paris or Inverness.

Those are her longest weeks of ‘51.

The pad of an index finger trailing across her parched lips, sailing down her chin to leave an open expanse for the gift of a searing kiss.

 _Mo nighean donn,_ _I’m here – feel me._

The one that snares her lungs and sparks an erratic arrhythmia exploits the memory of gifts bestowed upon her. Opalescent pearls dripping down her bare torso like droplets from fresh sea spray, the thumb of a scarred right-hand drifting over each jewel as though the beads of a rosary, encouraging anything _but_ a hail Mary. The beads reach the dip in her naval, carving a path to a land far south as lips brush the shell of her ear.

_Fosgail do shùilean, Sassenach._

These are the moments when she expects and _welcomes_ those words, floating into her unconscious like driftwood moseying along the surface of a burn.

No part of her imagination ever spares the precious reserves of memory to fulfil the scene that plays out before her now.

This is dirty and cruel, a decade’s worth of time knotted into a complex system of proxies and missed opportunities. The pearls are substituted for a broken and crusted ruby necklace, trailing from the split in her brow to the dip underneath her collarbone.

_Jamie isna dead, Claire._

Those words draw out unevenly, in a short and staccato burst that while Scottish in tongue, bear no resemblance to the reverent whispers graced in dream. In the last Hamletian move, the palm against her knee yields nothing but an anchored comfort sapped from a platonic well. The world could not possibly conjure a landscape or scene more antithetical to the ones her mind composes for her.

She supposes it’s divine retribution for daring to overturn history already written.

A comforting nudge draws her back to the man at her knees.

“ _Iron and salt_ , Claire. Tis better to know than tae live yer life trapped in brick an’ mortar wi’ no faith. I ken what that does tae a man.”

Murtagh’s motivations come from a well-intentioned place and she determines for herself that she would have wanted to know. As sparse as her elation seems, there is an electrical storm ravaging her from the inside, charging dopamine through every synapse from crown to sole. 

Wasn’t this what she always yearned for? Hadn’t she forsaken another love to make an eternal shrine for him? Still, even in this moment, she would trade near anything for one more shared space in time. 

But time always finds a way to prick the bubble. 

Love is love and though it fights from each corner both for husband and child, the day a swaddled infant with eyes as blue as the wings of a morpho butterfly curls against her breast, the hierarchy of her love is clear.

Jamie had known it and honoured it long before her own reckoning.

Her daughter belongs to a period and a father divergent of the time which they currently exist. There is no feasible reason to upend the stability Brianna has come to rely on for the sake of her own battered heart.

It’s a fate crueller than death; a life for a life.

Dr. Spock has no material on how to survive that mother’s sacrifice.

Questions regarding his escape and survival loom over her like a nimbus cloud, swollen with concern and intrigue. However, she fears the possession of such knowledge as much as Murtagh’s now bare truth. She surmises that she best know if there is a prospect of a chance encounter, no matter how small the possibility. The earth they tread has drawn them to one another time and time again and as much as it burns her to hope for a divide, to sever the temptation, the matchstick always longs for a flame.

“Is he here?” 

Could time be that cruel or kind?

“Not that I ken,” Murtagh answers with honesty, shrinking at the disappointment that washes over her, “we were separated at Ardsmuir. The governor o’ the prison took a shine tae the lad, ye might remember the wee redcoat scunner ye spared at Culloden?”

_Leave him alone you…you sadist!_

“Vaguely?”

“Sprouted tae a position of power and he spared Jamie th’ colonies. Only man of two hundred or more.”

The apples of her cheeks peak from the buoyancy of her smile. Murtagh’s explanation is no surprise to her, Jamie always had a certain knack for bypassing the noose. Dependent on a pardon or indenture Scotland seems highly likely. Jamie would be hesitant to leave the upkeep of Lallybroch resting solely on Jenny and Ian. 

_Jenny and Ian._

There are too many souls that have been lost to the conditions since her departure through the stones. Too many souls that her own longs to reconnect with; twentieth century friendships certainly aren’t her forte. She’s been far too lonely for longer than she can admit.

What a bloody awful mess.

This is not how she deserves to feel after the delivery of such news. No ego or humbleness could see the way she’s lived her life and condemn the animosity that pours from her. Even if it’s laid on her in the middle of a dilapidated shack, this was a script that she had harboured and nourished for so many years that she should be raving mad with joy.

Faith prevails. The war is won.

Then why does the earth feel like it’s falling out from underneath her?

Why does it _burn_ to breathe?

_Jamie isna dead, Claire._

It rows in circles, up and over the tumult until Murtagh moors her back from the open sea.

“Ye’ve been dealt a blow, Lass. I dinna mean to make light of yer situation, but fer the bairn’s sake we oughta lay some ground a’fore daybreak; Barker rises earlier than the godforsaken rooster.”

Pull up the bootstraps. Never a man to let her forget the urgency of their operation. If she can pry a miracle from the tatters in her hands it’s that the universe sends her Murtagh to muddle her through. The smallest graces are the ones that will ensure she survives the impending emotional slaughter.

Before Murtagh can renege on his kneeling position her hands shoot out to clasp his.

“Will you tell him?” she pleads, “when all of this is over…will you tell him about her? He deserves to know what became of her.”

His nod is as solemn and binding as the dirk Jamie binds his marital promises to.

“Aye, Lass,” he assures, “I pledge my soul tae it. He’ll ken ye had no choice.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter does divert from the traditional forward trajectory, and I hope the flashbacks help to inform the present. You'll find that these will intersperse through the story and shed light on Claire's journey. 
> 
> Chapter translations:
> 
> Fosgail do shùilean : Open your eyes (To the best of my knowledge).
> 
> For anyone still roughing this slow burn sea I salute you. Please know that your comments and opinions are treasured.


	6. The Kelpie & The Heron

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When you get sick & also decide to finish up the chapter to keep on schedule. Apologies for any off-brand/wacky concepts.

Her fingers slink to her wrist out of habit to trace the dial of a watch no longer in the same century. The pressing weight of time feels increasingly like a manacle, ticking to a metre all too fast for her liking. With every hour that sifts through her fingers, the miles between her and Brianna stretch to an unfathomable distance. It’s the longest since Bree’s earthly existence that she has suffered this wretched unknowing and it sits like silt in her throat.

Fatigue plagues her on the side-lines and she adopts a tight-lipped unobtrusiveness as Murtagh bandies together the fruits of several unpaid favours. Jamie had once christened him a _chancer_ , and if their bawdy highland minstrel show hadn’t proved that moniker, the midnight transactions in the back alleys of Wilmington certainly fortify it. A hemp grain sack fills with an untold number of spoils from a loaf of bread to a handful of single ammunition cartridges and scraps of salted bacon and ham.

Only an hour ago she had found Murtagh subsisting in abject poverty, and within a few knocks on debtors doors his hands overflow with corralled bounties. The ingenuity of the Fraser clansmen never ceases to amaze her, a trait that she’s watched bloom in her own flesh and blood from the moment she learns that words can be charmed and the rules challenged.

“Barker’ll grind your face into meat, you wily bastard,” the stable hand jests, handing Murtagh the reins to a dappled mare.

“Aye,” Murtagh agrees with a cluck of his tongue, “but nay if the auld coot drops wi’ apoplexy a’fore his parritch.”

The men revel in their conspiratorial laughter until strawberried by the efforts. It’s clear that Murtagh’s master hasn’t many allies in Wilmington from the number of tradesmen willing to risk aiding and abetting a servant’s escape. 

“She’s an old beast and she’s got a bit ‘o a temper on her, but she’s hardy; only one Fogitt won’t lash me for if she’s missin’.”

“Och,” Murtagh inhales, drawing the bitter evening air through clenched teeth, “I ken the goodwill ye part wi tonight, but th’ lassie will be needin’ a steed too.”

The boy’s attention flickers back to her a moment, adorned with a wild shock that fractures the camaraderie. Any lingering jest evaporates as though a flame doused by a bucket of water. 

“Are you blinkered?!” the lad hisses, blanching at the notion, “ _two_? They’ll see me hanged!”

Eyes as wide as saucers, he looks to her for support in hopes that her feminine sensibilities will shield him from Murtagh’s unreasonable request. A tinge of guilt seeps into the resolution barricading the overflow of heart and mind, but it isn’t enough to sway her to intervene. The men at Leoch had been privy to all manners of her temperament, whether that be her hard-headed, fiery disposition or the soft, nurturing facet of her being that made healing the most natural thing in the world to her. As awful as their demands are in these small hours, she has little courtesy to spare. 

Her silence is a non-verbal complicity.

Murtagh inches forward, towering over the boy with a practised malevolence, “I’ll no be askin’ again.”

For the hollow-cheeked, rakish slip of a thing she doesn’t expect him to match Murtagh in intimidation, but he surprises her in the jut of his chin and the leathered stub of toe against booted toe. The boy’s hued cheeks once pink with humour deepen with a ruddy anger that boils between him and the elder Fraser, threatening their streak of straightforward compliance.

“Ye ken ye’ll kiss the noose if ye don’t pay up, Laddie. Ye’ve debts to settle like any other man,” Murtagh warns.

“You’re askin’ me to choose between my life or a debt you-,” the boy tries to respond, but Murtagh intercepts his words by clawing the overflow of his cravat into his fist. 

It’s met with a furious thrashing, like the struggling of a fish dangling from a hook. The threat dials to a new intensity and she fears the repercussions of a brawl in the early hours; Murtagh isn’t the sprightliest of men since his indenture and imprisonment at Ardsmuir.

One miscalculated move and their venture washes away with their freedom. A decision furnishes the helpless corner of her mind, proffering an alternative to the dangerous path they’re treading. It is a fair trade for a well-bred filly, but half the price of passage back to the twentieth century that will only hamper future efforts. 

Ingenuity will get them far, but history has proven that her healing skills and torrid ditties scavenge only enough for them to survive until the next town.

“Here,” she finally disrupts the ensuing testosterone scuffle, drawing one of the ring boxes from her bodice. It’s the latter of the two rings she’d purchased from a Boston Macy’s. Though but less than an ounce, the box sits in the dent of her palm like a glowering lump of coal pulled from the mouth of a fire. A heavy, burning offer that will gain little more than a wound on her part.

Murtagh’s struggle to keep the boy in grasp eases as the emerald catches a sliver of moonlight, enticing the compliance they had been seeking all along. She can feel the glower of disapproval from her co-conspirator but she holds fast, vindicated by her choice as the boy steps aside to inspect the ring.

“You can start a whole new life if you find the right buyer,” she urges, “but we’ll require another horse, a _younger_ horse.”

She holds her breath for the seconds it takes for the boy to mull it over, but like any disproportionate exchange the party facing the valuable end of the deal takes little time to accept. Greed for a new start in life, away from the indentures of unholy men wielding the lashing whip is a temptation too strong to rail against.

“There’s a filly we imported a few week ago, Ma’am,” he buckles, accepting the box from her with a motion to follow through the stables, “Fogitt had her ordered for a dandy fella for the racin’. She’s a young’in but she can run the north side o’ the Cape in less’n a day. See!”

“Is that so?” she questions for effect, glancing at Murtagh who had resumed his surly countenance.

She only knows what she has gleaned from Jamie over a decade ago, but the horse seems healthy enough for cantering through the merchant trails of North Carolina.

“Fourteen hands and clean legs, Ma’am.”

“Doesna look like a racin’ horse tae me,” Murtagh gripes, frowning at the auburn filly in the stall, “s’half the size o’ th’ mare.”

“Narragansett Pacer she is, if you _ken_ that you’ll be on your way with her.”

 _Bite, Murtagh,_ she thinks. The hour is waning and they’re already battling a widening gulf.

For the sake of his pride he revels in a moment of consideration, then gestures for the lad to get on with it with a wordless grunt. The boy hitches a saddle over one shoulder and turns to unlock the paddock, “you’ll need to ride th-.”

Before she can interpret the sleight of hand, the crack of a rifle butt against skull reverberates in the air; the stable hand fells like a sack of potatoes, crumpling into a heap atop an unbaled bed of hay.

“ _Murtagh_!” she scorns, reaching the limits of her delinquency with an unbridled hiss.

Her Hippocratic oath forces her to act and she’s swiftly on her knees, cradling the boy’s head and palpating the area of the parietal bone that the rifle had struck. Relief balms the thrumming heartbeat in her chest when she determines that the skin hasn’t split nor the skull depressed. Adding manslaughter to their charge sheet will only serve to increase the bounty on their heads. 

Nonplussed by his actions, Murtagh scavenges in the boy’s pockets and withdraws the velveteen box, handing it back to her as quickly as she had relinquished it. 

“Ye need this; fer the bairn and fer yersel. Tis no for a Laddie in Wilmington, ye ken it’ll be squandered here, Claire.”

She doesn’t quite know what to say to that. Though, the relief she feels at having the ring back in her possession is something she’ll need to do some soul searching for later. Murtagh tacks up the horse while she tends to the boy, settling him in the recovery position in case of a concussed vomiting spell. It’s the mother in her that struggles to reconcile with the brutality of their actions, unable to dismiss the festering weight of iniquity as she draws the pad of her finger over the boy’s brow.

He reminds her of Fergus, or what she imagines a decade would have carved him into; the same cleft in his chin and wild corkscrew curls as chatoyant as the Lallybroch peat after a rainstorm.

_But I belong with you._

“I’m sorry,” she whispers a few inches from the shell of his ear, another atonement she will have to abide in the twentieth century. She fears that the list will only grow as the days unearth.

“Ye’ll be takin’ th’ mouse,” Murtagh orders, passing her the reins to the filly, “we’ll ride ‘til the first trading post.”

She can’t help but notice how his Scottish thickens the longer she settles around him, nor the budding tenacity that fills his bones now that she offers him a secondary purpose. It’s faint, but the needlework slowly begins to mend the frayed edges that Ardsmuir and Barker ravaged. 

“Up ye go, Lassie,” he grunts, aiding her onto her horse.

_Jamie isna dead, Claire._

It blooms a hope for her, that one day her own time-worn tapestry will gild itself again. In titian and auburn with flecks of Aegean blue.

*

They ride hard.

The duality of Brianna’s rescue and Murtagh’s distance from the impending bounty hunt underpins their race through the night.

Chilled swathes of air nip at her cheeks until they’re raw, compounded by the numbing, glacial cloudburst that seeps into every dry fibre of her garments. If not for the rhythmic peace that rainfall brings, she might have envied the sun-kissed lands that Frank remains to inhabit. The staccato chorus of hoofbeats marries the rustling vinyl of rain in her ears, and the litany of questions that sit on the tip of her tongue regarding Jamie are abated.

For a time, anyway.

Murtagh keeps the pace with his mare but she can feel the filly’s impatience bleeding through in her uneven gait.

After Culloden, she revisits driving with a definite sense of trepidation. The gear stick and clutch are no longer her acquaintances and it takes a few juddering starts around the streets of Oxford before she can comfortably join the traffic of her century. In the same vein, remembering equine commands and the combinations of pressure sets her off to an undignified start. Not that her filly minds as she enacts each turn, even if it sends them in a loop until Murtagh reminds her to use her indirect rein.

It’s a fair sight better than the temperamental outbursts from Murtagh’s mare who intermittently bucks him for the first ten miles.

“ _Ye camsheuch waste o’ offal!”_

By now Wilmington will be lighting the other end of the candle, rallying a bounty team to track their passage through the wilderness. Their head start will keep them afloat for as long as they can stave off the visceral exhaustion, but they will have to make camp eventually. 

The America she knows and loves whips by in unrecognisable pastoral fragments and she wonders if Brianna has gleaned the magnitude of her transition yet. The Bugs’ recount of her daughter’s first night on Ocracoke still churns an anxious current within her, and she dreads the exchanges Bree might have had with the Welshman. Automobiles and electricity are topics that will stoke the fire in any religious zealot. She doesn’t need to rekindle the memory of her lashing at Cranesmuir to fill the blanks of what such language and notions can lead to.

Her teeth stop rattling just as the night retires, bringing forth a balmy sunrise that glints off the deluge on fronds and the rain pooled in wagon tracks. Soaked to the bone and drunk on the light-headed weariness of no sleep, she can’t help indulging in the smell of sweetgum and hickory. Recently, she’s been confined to the white-wash sterility of her hospital and the musty chambers of the lecture hall that this America feels so entirely foreign and refreshing. 

She can barely remember the last time she took Bree to Olmstead Park or the Muddy River just to feel the wind on her face. Delegation and sacrifice have been her default parental settings as of late and the realisation strikes a painful chord. 

If.

That’s a dangerous word that has spurned her many a time. Only now, knowing the fate granted to those she left behind, _if_ is the conflagration that burns her Bostonian foundations to the ground. 

All that time, through all that pain he _could_ have been there, for her _and_ for his daughter. 

During those hard nights with infant Brianna, when she was colicky and raw with diaper rash and her own arms just weren’t enough to soothe the cries. He would have held her through the night, whispering weaved tales of selkies and the Wulver from Celtic folklore passed down through the Fraser generations. No half-forged contrivances plucked from the pages of Frank’s _Scottish Myths & Legends _that bear no heart. Or the summer Bree is so frightful of horses that she has to cancel the block of riding lessons she books for her birthday, despite the bone-deep love she has for the creatures that embellish her walls and trinkets.

_Dinna fash, a nighean; Donas is named fer the Devil, but yer Mam’s horse is as kind as a faerie; ridin’ is in yer blood. Ye no need to be scairt when yer wi’ me._

It’s crisp and clear in her mind’s eye. A whole life stolen from her fingertips, only to lay in wait on the other side of time’s curtain. Brianna has not been neglected of a father by any means, and in no way can she dilute the love Frank pours into her, but _this_ …

This was supposed to be theirs.

Sharing bannocks in the glens with wicker baskets of foraged herbs and wildflowers at their feet; cheeks dappled by the mist of highland rain renewing peat-smudged skin. Brianna, soft and plump in her ill-knitted mitts and sontag shawl that her father would have to unspool and re-stitch in the wee hours, fearful of hurting her mother’s feelings. 

Of course, she’s romanticising. Life with Jamie had been equally -if not oftentimes- unbalanced in the hardships they faced. There are still patches of her history that she only shares with him, unable to detach them for Frank’s scrutiny the night she bares her truth by Reginald’s hearth.

But she would have been whole. A better mother. A better _wife_.

The melancholy of her train of thought tapers off to a dull ache as Murtagh vies for her attention with a sharp whistle. Her filly snorts a puff of cold vapour, slowing their canter to a trot.

“River’s overrun,” Murtagh gestures to the swathe of boggy earth stretching for the next few yards, “watch yersel an’ that thing ye call a horse; th’ Rocky Point post ain’t far now.”

Just to prove a point his mare dares another buck.

“ _Stad_! Ye proved yer no dandelion, ye daft _fient_!”

The smirk curling the corner of her lip feels like a permanent fixture since Wilmington and it irks him now the same way it had all those years ago.

“She rather reminds me of you,” she quips, steering her rein a little more to the left to avoid a boulder, “though her grooming is much better.”

“Rupert found ye wittier than ye are, Claire. Dinna let it go tae yer heid.”

Inch by inch they claw their way back to some semblance of normalcy. 

Stagnant river water joins the damp of rainfall in cloddy splatters, until they look like they’ve been pulled from the mouth of the bursting current itself. It’s uncomfortable, but oh so familiar; one of those arduous rides that makes her yearn for a bar of tallow and lye. 

They’re met with indifference at the trading post. The paltry provisions tacked to their horses leave little in the way of curiosity, which she counts as a blessing. Coupled with the loss of her satchel and her medical supplies, the little Murtagh prises from his debtors already leaves them in a vulnerable position. Scotland had taught them to be frugal with less, but the redcoats aren’t their only enemy in Colonial America. The less they have to peacock on the trail the less conspicuous they are to the highway men of straddling the trails of North Carolina.

Once the horses are settled at the feed station, she diverges from Murtagh with an unspoken understanding drawn from their last search. Brianna’s father has more than prepared them for the trials of scouring the plains for lost Fraser kin. The only saving grace in this hunt is that she’s not looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found.

Her inquiries start with the far north plots saddled by textile merchant wagons, accosting each proprietor with a catalogue of Brianna’s discernible features, until they’re certain that their _maybes_ and uncertainties are definitive _nos_.

_A smattering of sun-spots. Red hair a little like rust and chestnut. Milky complexion. Blue! Her eyes are blue like the cornflowers in summer._

She catches Murtagh in her peripheral, talking with hands to a circle of pipe-smoking revellers. Much like Wilmington, nobody seems to see much of anything, unless it thwacks them straight in the face or can be found at the bottom of a tankard. A disquiet coils within her when Murtagh catches her eye and shakes his head, “ _nought but bampots on th’ drink.”_ She doesn’t expect any of this to be easy, but neither does she pre-empt the cascade of nothingness that rolls off the tongues of those she interrogates.

Her temper is nigh on bitter when she’s distracted by the sound of full-bellied laughter.

“Ma! Look!”

She’s lassoed by a memory of Bree dangling from the monkey bars, begging for appraisal. They’re not the slightly lisped exclamations from her own daughter, but the childlike enthusiasm intrigues her all the same. Chubby, dirt-crusted fingers aeroplane the stuffed foot of a stocking through the air and across imaginary wetlands in a galloping motion. 

The child’s mother captures her eye and they share a moment of unity, for the overly buoyant affirmations that come with the role of motherhood.

“Tis a _fine_ horse, Alice.”

“Nay, Ma. It’s not a horse, s’a _kelpie_!”

The air snuffs from her lungs.

Her heartbeat strums in her ears like the Scottish tenor drums of ceilidhs past. Swallowing the thick layer of anxiety that cottons her mouth she crouches before the little girl razing her _kelpie_ through a murky plashet. 

“May I see?” she asks, trying to dim the pleading intonation in her voice. What she’s able to salvage in tone disperses to her hands, clammy with anticipation. Alice considers her request with a suspicious scrutiny, but much like the whims of children she’s easily subdued by the gentleness in her request and the summery smile carved into her cheeks.

The rock-stuffed elbow of the stocking makes it a heavy and uncomfortable toy, tied off by a plait of dried grass to keep it from falling apart. No ears, and two dirt clod eyes that have now smeared into silty splotches on the cotton; it’s a roughshod attempt, but entirely too coincidental.

_Brianna, I’ll let you inform your Mother about what became of her nylons._

_I’m sorry, Mama! I was makin’ a kelpie!_

“Did you make this, Alice?” she finds her voice again, “this plait here looks very difficult.”

_Thrum. Thrum. Thrum._

“Nay,” Alice replies, gently removing the makeshift kelpie from the cradle of her hands, “t’was my friend, Bree. She gave it to me.”

It’s confirmation more powerful than any sandal or _Milk Duds_ carton and she suddenly feels entirely overwhelmed. She’s inhabited a permanent state of anxiety since Ocracoke and each minute validation chips away at the distressed varnish. Her knees pray to the floor as she pads fingertips to stem the burgeoning sting in her eyes.

_My friend Bree._

“Are ya alright, Miss?” Alice’s mother crosses the distance from her basin and washboard, concern colouring the air between them.

“I’m sorry,” she bites out, finding herself some composure and the strength to stand, “young Alice here just confirmed some wonderful news for me.”

“She did?” 

The woman’s perplexed look switches from the child and back to her, unsure of what exactly is unfolding between them.

“You might be able to help me also,” she tests the waters, “I’m looking for my daughter, Brianna. _Bree_. You might have crossed paths with her here?”

“ _Bree_? The fair little rose?”

She nods fervently, brimming with a tearful joy, “I’m her mother -Claire - there’s been a grave misunderstanding.”

“Well, ya certainly nay in Boston, s’fursure,” Alice’s mother volleys back, “the littl’n is heart-crossed on seeing herself back North.”

The questions rain down like a hail of arrows. 

“Was she okay? Is she well?”

“Scarfed a trencher of hodgepodge faster than I could ladle it, but yes, she were thrivin’. Her companion didn’t seem much in the way of hygiene so she shared th’ kettle bath with Alice. Left yesterday eve and I sent her in the wagon with some morsels and told ‘er not to let that oaf badger her for a share.”

The gratitude she has for Alice’s mother spills forth in the form of a barrelling hug.

“ _Thank you_. Thank you for being kind to her.”

“Claire!”

She’s stolen from the moment by Murtagh’s hollering and an overzealous tug at her elbow, “a man kens th’ John ye’ve been searchin’, they’re headin’ up th’ King’s Highway tae New Bern.”

And just like that their tide of luck changes.

One day’s ride behind the little girl valiantly trying to make her way home.

*

The hours feel somewhat lighter now that their compasses have been aligned. 

With high noon comes an unexpected heat that coddles the exhaustion riddled in her bones. It’s a feat to keep herself from slumping off her filly until Murtagh draws the line, ordering a few hours of respite under the shade of a sweetgum. 

She falls into a boneless slumber atop the bracken without much protest, safe in the knowledge of Murtagh’s watchful guard. When the heat cools from the earth beneath her she awakens with sharper senses and a renewed vigour; it’s the first time since 1746 that she wakes and does not mourn for the Scotsman left to die on the fields of Culloden 

Only for the time lost between them. 

Before they recommence the journey, she seeks out the nearby creek with the slice of tallow and lye that Alice’s mother gifts her. As with the debris of a detonated decade, the day washes from her skin and retreats with the warbling current.

Not until she folds the soap into a square of hemp, does she become aware of the two ram-rod straight legs a few feet from her own perch on the creek bank. 

The great blue heron lingers only a moment to regard her before dissolving the indelible bond between them with a great flight.

_What a pretty bird._

Hope really is the thing with feathers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter I dedicate to my google search history.
> 
> It's never taken a beating as hard as this story. Oh, and in case someone sues me, yes, the last line is inspired by Emily Dickinson's "Hope" Is The Thing With Feathers.


	7. Que Sera Sera

Seven days and nights diffuse like smoke in the wind, doused by an unseasonable deluge that leaves her lungs raw with damp. If the precipitation isn’t falling in curtains, it’s tarring the air in a fine scotch mist that gathers like pearls on her eyelashes. Infant fires kindled by nests of tinder are of little comfort when the hems of her skirts are the only beneficiaries of the warmth; cold is now their default state.

Their provisions of salted ham and bacon are finished by their fourth evening on the road, a palm-sized scrap washed down with rain gathered from the curled lamina of leaves. The hunger isn’t something she minds, having been robbed of an appetite since her surgical intern year, but the weakness that seeps into tremors of malnourishment entices action. With little to trade on the road - spare the rings at her bosom - they’re forced to work with the bounties of the earth, foraging for anything that can satiate the gurgle of famishment. 

As the boundary to the Croatan Forest nears, their food stores grow from salads of chickweed, mallow and wood sorrel to the hard-sought chanterelle mushrooms lurking under a carpet of leaves. That particular discovery tides over Murtagh’s grumblings for a few nights; well, only after a laborious discourse over whether they’d drop dead from the creek-washed foliage. Anything that shouldn’t be served with a bannock runs afoul of his distaste and mistrust, though she’s quick to remind him of the grass Jamie had eaten in his youth. Her botanical knowledge of wild herbs has certainly kept them adrift from that level of desperation. 

_ “Bounty hunters wilna be able tae track us through cack at least. They’ll think it tae be a rabbit or a deer settin’ camp wi’ this feed runnin’ through ye.” _

It doesn’t stop Murtagh from attempting to lay his meagre traps that lack the materials for a working snare. He’s heard of wild turkeys and quails aplenty in the back countries and it spurs on his fruitless efforts as she scours the landscape with the grain sack. Suffice to say, she’s the breadwinner of their efforts, scrounging up rations of boiled cattail stems wrapped in burdock leaves. They might not be the Parisian pastries from  _ Stohrer _ , but she can’t be faulted for the bloat of a full stomach that sets the foundations for a steady night’s sleep.

Tonight, they’ve surrendered the last vestiges of their day to settling camp at the root base of a fallen oak. Per recently established tradition, she leaves Murtagh to build a shelter from the litter of the forest floor and dutifully plucks the grain sack from the saddlebag. The terrain has shifted so vastly in the last thirty miles, from open farmlands to deciduous forest and marsh picosins, that she’s hopeful for a substantial haul. 

“Dinna stray too far, Claire,” Murtagh bites over his shoulder as she heads towards a clearing, “we dinna ken these parts.” His order finishes with a spluttering, phlegmy cough that reminds her to keep a sharp eye for some lungwort or thyme. 

The arrows speared into a cypress trunk flicker in her mind’s eye, only ten miles ride south from where they choose to settle.

“I’ll be careful,” she promises, staving off a witty retort. They haven’t been much inclined towards jest since losing Brianna’s trail. Hope that had bloomed and wound up the trellis of her soul had been razed to a pile of cinders six nights prior. The day their charging pace towards the King’s Highway is impeded by a landslide over the gorge pathway that forces them to double back, losing another day’s ride.

_ Giveth and taketh. _

The earth is as glutinous as cake-batter under her fingertips but the tender shoots of a milkweed plant are worth the excavation. She’s thankful for the few trips she had taken with Brianna and Frank before the excuse of work to mask the crags in their relationship crept in. In between lazy beach lounging and tours of colonial forts, she found quiet moments to draw out regional botany guides and take clippings for the patch of garden assigned for her collection. It’s a facet of her past that Frank doesn’t interpret as revisiting, rather an enjoyment that roots her in her own world and connects her with the lush reality of life that outlives her past. A blessing under these circumstances, that while America shares common perennials and wild herbs with those in Britain, she’s already versed in the native species that nourish them along the road.

Plenty of vegetation and herbage still confound her and she steers clear of unidentifiable berries and fruits, but their stomachs are not left wanting.

With foraging and camping in the wilderness comes the annihilation of her exposed skin, marred by the bites of mosquitos and red fire ants. She bats off the drunken flight of a swarm of midges from a particularly boggy patch of growth and curses their wild kinetics. Underneath the swarm she’s intrigued by a handful of matured shoots that glisten from a verdant shade of lime to rhubarb rose. Her excitement is palpable as she stalks her fingers down one of the stems and carefully uproots it from the ground.

Chalky white bulbs validate her suspicion.  _ Wild ramps.  _ A little spring crispness to add to the bitter salad of milkweed shoots and burdock that will surely keep Murtagh off her case.

A stagnant puddle serves as an intermediary handwash and once satisfied she finally draws back the rain matted tendrils of hair behind the curve of her ear. Remnants of daylight still splinter through the fractured tree canopy and she resolves to venture a little further, buoyed by what the land already has to offer. Murtagh’s knife –  _ tis no a dirk, isna a Scot metal in it –  _ is tucked safely in the hem of her skirts, warm against the skin of her hip. The point settles uncomfortably in her flesh when she bends to inspect potential food sources, but it’s a comfort to have considering man and beast are still looming threats off the highway.

The river runs east of their temporary settlement and she uses it as a rudimentary map to keep herself from straying too far. She’ll bring the horses to graze and drink once the necessities of food and shelter are squared away, but the list she’s written in her head is still a few items short. Murtagh’s rattling cough is a cold comfort, but she’s satisfied of her whereabouts and slips down a bank towards the river.

As was the aroma of apple blossom shisha in Cairo, the perfumes of the forest are as close to a poultice for the heart as she can imagine. The petrichor of fresh rain laced over moss and leaf-litter is as homely to her as the sandalwood candles stocked in her larder for blackouts and thanksgiving dinners. Frank and Brianna had often found cause to tease her for the comfortability she found in nature, that one day she might leave them for cabin life in the woods. Oftentimes she had thought it some cruel taunt that Frank had impressed upon their unsuspecting daughter, a subtle stomping on toes when her mind seemed lost with the Craigh Na Dun faeries.

But she finds solace in the wilderness, always has, even before Inverness and her fateful journey through time. The cologne of nature is a salve for her lungs and she inhales gulping breaths to the orchestra of the river’s current. In another world this could be her idea of serenity.

“Ah!” the surprise is wrought from her lips as soon as she spies a familiar fungi at the base of an oak. She inspects it for the concentric growth circles and a pattern of porous skin on the underside of the leaves. The hen of the woods mushroom joins the ramps and milkweed, another veritable success and an added weight to their meal. She slinks around the cleft of the riverbank, gathering clumps of shrubbery that will join the medicinal snippets stored in her saddlebag.

Soon, the sun reflects off the surface of the river in a violent halo of ember tones, warning her of the impending twilight. It only takes a few moments to wash the imprints of the forest from her spoils and with a plaited thread of dried bluegrass she ties the sack closed.

It isn’t until she retraces the trail back to camp that the shadows of a skeleton village across the water accost her in a chaotic splatter of ink across the backdrop of sunset; spindly, roofless structures scattered akin to matchsticks impaled into the ground. A spinal-chill runs through her, it reminds her of the hollowed remnants in France the night after an airstrike: razed and burnt.

Unsettled, she returns to camp in the knowledge that their grounds are thus far uninhabited, though haunted by the ghosts of untold horrors. She isn’t an American history expert, but she knows enough of the tragedies and injustice that has plagued and will plague the lands on which she stands.

“And what rabbit fodder might’n ye have for supper this eve, Lassie?” Murtagh snips from his horizontal rest under the makeshift shelter.

Her guilt still burns evergreen in her gut, but she’s missed the jesting terribly. As ever, Murtagh knows exactly when to recommence the peppery zing of sarcasm.

“Bannocks and venison,” she volleys back, dumping the sack at his feet, “wrestled a deer and Mrs Fitz down by the river.”

“Ye better a’ wiped the blood from th’ knife?”

She fondles the grip of the blade and gently removes it from her waistband, tossing it hilt-first onto the bracken by his left flank.

“Clean as a whistle.”

His inspection is overacted and ends with a decisive nod, “aye.”

The night tapers off into a comforting blend of fireside cooking and camp maintenance to whistled renditions of  _ The Bonny Earl of Moray.  _ If she closes her eyes, she can almost transport herself back to the glen where she’d first heard it, blanketed in Jamie’s tartan by a roaring fire as Rupert’s rhenish-spiked croon dances on the wind. They’d been married near a day and beyond the indescribable electrical current that suddenly tied her to the red-headed Scotsman she now called husband, it’s one of the few memories that linger from those hours.

“I missed that,” she admits with sincerity once Murtagh’s hum quietens to silence, “they don’t make music ballads like that anymore. It was… _ nice _ .”

“Hmm,” Murtagh murmurs, taken hostage by his own ghosts. He pays a dear price for the revelry and the congestion in his chest returns with a vengeance until he’s wheezing for scraps of air. She’s at his side in an instant, urging him upright and against the trunk of the tree to open up his airways.

“Dinna fash, Claire,” he tries to shrug her off, “tis nay but a touch o’ the cauld, ye ken.”

She ignores him and manages to palm his forehead to take an estimation of his temperature, much like she’d done for Brianna in childhood, “you’re warm,” she mutters to herself.

“Better late than never. Ye can thank me fer the doozie of a fire.”

Her eyes roll out of habit.  _ Bloody Scots. _

She ransacks the saddle bag once more and plucks a handful of thyme and slippery elm bark. Murtagh’s protestations fall on deaf ears as she strips and grinds the bark between two stones, adding it to the already boiling decoction of thyme once ground. The brew swirls and thickens once the mucilage from the thyme sweats out and within ten minutes, she’s handing him a quart of the liquid in a tankard.

“Och,  _ dia _ ! Tis fit only ter make ye boak! I wouldna drink it even if it were la grippe!”

“You’ll drink it or I’ll funnel it down your neck,” she threatens him, fear more than frustration spurring her curtness. In all truth, she worries that it  _ is _ a case of influenza and she hasn’t anything but plants to stave off the damage that it could wreak upon him. The diagnostics run through her mind in a mental recital: systemic, nasopharynx, muscular and respiratory. He doesn’t complain to her but she’s eyed him throughout the night and noted the feverish pallor of his skin and his lack of mobility. The exposure from his time in Ardsmuir and the austerity of his indenture leaves him vulnerable and any infection could carry him off faster than she could find a cure for it.

She’s _not_ losing anyone else to this damn century.

He senses the fire burning in her eyes and not a man to be scored by her vicious tongue without reason, he takes a grimaced sip.

_ Thank you.  _

“ _ Sgrathail _ ,” he mutters and visibly jolts to prevent a retch, “tis putrid cack even fer yersel and yer weeds, Claire.”

She’ll wear _cack_ as an emblem if it keeps him alive. He takes the successive gulps with a pinch of his nose and she can’t fault the attempt he makes for her, because they both know the price of their failure. 

_ Brianna. _

“Give me a ditty from yer time,” he orders after a malodorous belch, still shuddering against the roiling nausea ignited by her remedy, “need tae distract my neb and gut.”

A tinge of rouge warms her cheeks at the request and the memory of their minstrel days. It had been a god-awful experience then and she had only learned to overcome the mortification in its totality in the confines of Brianna’s nursery and rocking chair. 

Murtagh reads her before she can decline, “I’m no askin’ fer a show.”

She sucks in a breath through clenched teeth and thrusts back against her own portion of the trunk with crossed arms. In a whirlwind of music from Elvis Presley to Perry Como and Fred Astaire, she settles on Doris Day. 

_ Que Sera Sera,  _ a tune that had trilled from the bedroom door with an ochre ‘B’ for a string of three weeks one spring. Frank had almost had a stroke of his own and threatened to snip the plug from the record player in an apoplectic fit. 

_ Isn’t it a pretty song, Mama?  _

_ Whatever will be will be. The future's not ours to see. _

“...que sera, sera.”

The poignancy of Brianna’s favourite song is not lost on either of them and the sniping abates for another time. 

“S’a bonny song.” 

“Yes, Brianna thought as much.”

She twists the lattice of her fingers in knots as the memories of Brianna’s off-key renditions flood her plains of thought. The silence is a period of convalescence for their ailments and misfortune, though she can sense a shift in the air as the fire interrupts with a crackling spittle. Unanswered questions and swathes of unchronicled time oscillate like a pendulum between them. 

That is until Murtagh finds a moment of repose from the exertion of his hacking cough. The thyme and slippery elm seem to settle his chest if only to let him breathe more openly. 

“Yer gave us plenty o’ thought in Ardsmuir,” he admits, scratching a muddied nail over the salt whiskers carpeting his chin, “of what became of ye. How you and th’ bairn were fairin’ in yer time. T’was a hard time ye ken, but every now and then ye came tae be an’ gave us pause. The lad listened to ye, kent how tae mash yer wee milk thistle intae a brew an’ kept me from death’s threshold. Even in yer own time ye saved an old coot’s hide. I havena thanked ye fer it.”

It isn’t her gratitude to accept but she doesn’t have it in her to fight the sentiment. Instead, she succumbs to his grace and settles against him, head to shoulder as she had with her dear Uncle Lamb all those years ago. 

“Dinna weep, Lass,” Murtagh extends his left arm around her shoulder, “whatever will be will be.”

_ The future’s not ours to see. _

*

Dawn does not wake her from the trenches of sleep as it had the mornings before. When she blinks into wakefulness from her damp leaf bed she half thinks she’s lost her sight, until the smattering of stars above her glint in remembrance of Christmas tinsel.

The horses are restless.

Jostling hooves and snorts of agitation put her on high alert and she peels herself from the ground. With the fire doused sometime before they settle down to sleep there is no light source to illuminate the danger that stalks their way. Instinctively, her hand crawls to the last known resting spot of Murtagh’s rifle, sweeping across the forest bed until she meets the cool metallic barrel.

“Murtagh,” she hisses, nudging his flank. 

Animal or man she cannot see nor hear what spooks the horses and Murtagh’s lethargic groan puts a pit in her throat. His forehead is slick with the sweat of a fever that has boiled through the night and the malady renders him near delirious. 

_ Jesus H Roosevelt Christ. _

Her untrained hands cradle the rifle as poorly as she handles the dirk during her training in Inverness. Tools of death and destruction have never felt welcome in her hands, for she employs them to reverse the damage that weapons create. 

Murtagh’s congested breathing crackles in the night air beside her. The gurgle of sputum bleeds into the cacophony of the forest orchestra, in with the susurrus of leaves and the whisperings of the engorged river. Her own ear has languished in the safety of the twentieth century. North or south, east or west, none of the midnight sounds strike her as the source. 

The mare bucks with a distressed whinny, prompting her onto her feet where a goose-flesh strikes like a match against her skin and scores a bolt of cold dread down her limbs. 

“Shhh,” she ushers over to Murtagh’s steed, cupping the velvety flesh of her muzzle, “it’s okay, Old Girl. What is it?”

The mare takes little comfort in her efforts and she sidesteps the kick of a hind leg within an inch of her life.

And then she hears it through the adrenaline thump of blood in her ears.

A distant rabble of voices twining through the forest.

_ “…Barker an’ Foggit…he runs…hole in his head…” _

The hunt.

Her attention darts back to Murtagh splayed on the ground, pallid as chalk and rasping for air. 

She hasn’t much of a choice. 

Fistfuls of his shirt bunch in her fingers and she tries to stifle the strained grunting sounds ripping from her core in the struggle to get him upright. 

How could bannocks and drabs of pheasant cultivate these Scottish giants?

“You bloody great oaf,” she hisses, cursing the Fitzgibbon-Fraser gene pool. Try as she might with her enviable health, she’s no longer the twenty-two-year-old nurse barrelling through the fields of France; her strength is no match for Murtagh’s six-foot deadweight.

It’s not her intention to be so cruel but their very existence demands it. 

Her palm rains down against the scruff of his cheek with a veritable slap, jerking him into a reactive explosion of consciousness. That same palm smothers a torrent of blasphemy that tries to break ranks from his lips and she supersedes it with a bullet spray of directives.

What she doesn’t prepare for is his protest.

“Leave…Claire,” he tries to subvert her attempts to wrench him to his feet with a pathetic swat against her hip, “go tae Bree.” 

_ Bloody sacrificial fool. _

“I don’t…have…time…” she grunts breathlessly, hitching herself under his shoulder, “for  _ fucking…  _ Fraser… dramatics. Get your arse onto the horse.  _ Now. _ ”

_ “…follow the river, rats will never stray far from the water…” _

The clippings of conversation are no longer half-unintelligible fragments.

Her determination morphs into anger.

They’ve come this far. 

“If you stay, I stay,” she threatens as he continues to resist her in his fevered delirium, “and I swear to all that is holy, if something happens to Brianna I  _ will _ cut off your pintle, Fitzgibbons.”

It stirs something behind those glassy eyes, like dropping a match to a pool of gasoline. She may as well have shoved a poker up his behind for the visceral grunt that rockets him into a stupor of action. 

_ Oh, thank god.  _

She jacks herself under his shoulder as though a crutch. One... two...three, and she fights the unsteadiness of his gait, bearing the brunt of his exhaustion. 

“Just a few...steps…” she promises, her own chest burning from a compound of her exertion and the wintry vapour of night. 

_ “Horseshoes north, two sets…” _

There’s no time to salvage anything that isn’t strapped to the filly.

She has no idea how she manages it but Murtagh collapses against the withers of her horse, spasming in the throes of his fever.

They’re not quick enough.

A bullet ricochets past her left ear and missiles into a nearby oak, sparking a domino effect of catastrophic proportions.

This time, the mare does not miss her.

Once the hoof clips her left radius, she knows it’s broken; a dull snap and the fissure of pain are secondary to her keen intuition. The mare wrenches free of her slipknot and before she can snatch the reins it escapes into the density of the forest, whinnying in terror. The clench of her teeth almost splits the skin of her lower lip but she resolves to let the fury of the situation drive her, pulling herself back up from the mud and onto the filly in a wild rage.

Two more bullets whistle past them and into the black curtain of night.

“Price is dead or alive!”

The filly chomps at the bit, vying to be set free from the storm.

“Time to show us what you’re really made of, girl,” she urges, before relinquishing all trust into the four-legged creature.

Her trust is rewarded.

Brush and branches lash at her like the stinging crack of a whip as they charge through the depths of the forest. The reins are slick in the clamminess of her right palm, but the filly takes each command whether it be a fraught veer left or a snap to the right.

Fear has no course but onward, yet in some ways she feels drawn like a magnet to metal. 

She doesn’t look back; time has taught her that nothing can be gained from such a risk.

Swatches of bog and mire tear underfoot for miles. She’s unsure exactly when the filly outpaces the hunt, preoccupied with keeping Murtagh astride the horse and her mind off the searing pain in her left arm. Awareness of their safety only floods her when dawn breaks overhead, birthing blue skies redolent of those she’d left back in the Bostonian summer. 

Dense forest gives way to the lakes and plains of the flatlands, welcoming them into the vast expanse of everything and nothing.

They survive.

Gratuity pours from her for whatever deity spares them.

The filly loses her enthusiasm for the canter as they approach the lakeside and she decides to make it their first pit stop. Her one-handed dismount is pitiful and she kisses the ground faster than she can adjust her footing on the stirrup. 

“Fuck.”

In true comedic fashion, Murtagh flops off the filly’s other flank, meeting the maker of his own gravitational pull. 

She wants to laugh but the deadened thud and silence reminds her of his peril. Left arm to breast, she drags herself over to him, brow knitted in concern for his quiet demeanour. 

“Murtagh?”

She lays an ear against his chest and listens for the static of infection. The thrum of her own pulse battles with the slow rhythm of his, a waltz that she can’t separate to count. 

“You’re not dying on me,” she insists, “you don’t get to walk back into my life after believing you dead for ten years and then die on me in a week. I...I’ll kill you.”

A fragment of a laugh gathers in his throat, strangled by the asphyxiation of another wheezing cough. 

But it’s there.

Never one to miss a moment of her wrath. 

In need of respite, she allows them some time under the fresh sun, basking in the first glimmer of unadulterated sunshine afforded to them since Wilmington. Though, the physician in her is rarely off duty. 

After stripping a length of fabric from her petticoats to fashion a sling for her malformed arm, she resumes her care-giving duties. She cups and pours palmfuls of freshwater over Murtagh’s brow to cool his fever, then helps him swallow to re-hydrate the electrolyte loss. 

“What I wouldn’t give for a dram of Colum’s rhenish right about now,” she mutters, the coil of adrenaline still snaking in her belly. The night is behind them but with the day comes a new set of trials.

One horse and half a camp lost. 

She thinks that’s a fair price for their lives. 

In fact, the mare has probably done Murtagh a favour. If the influenza doesn’t carry him off, the brain trauma from the mare’s bucking would have been a close contender. 

They lay for as long as it takes to regain a modicum of strength. For her that means chewing on feverfew leaves for the pain of the break and for him it allows his lungs some warmth and respite from the damp. 

Though, his condition only seems to worsen. 

She marches back and forth to the lake with another strip of petticoat that becomes the closest thing to a cold compress she can fashion. 

On her third trip she takes a silent moment for herself, unsettled by the reflection that mirrors up at her from the surface of the lake. 

Wild isn’t just a term for creatures of the forests. It’s a term that sticks to her like a grass burr, reflecting the god-awful nest atop her head and the violently dark circles that mar the skin under her eyes.

She flicks the water and distorts the image out of annoyance. It’s nothing she hasn’t seen in the mirror after spending a night consoling her three-month-old. 

“You better still be alive when I get back,” she calls back to Murtagh while dipping the petticoat compress back into the lake, then gently wrings it. 

A staccato medley of coughs is slung back in her general direction.

“I don’t know where we are,” she continues to fill the void of silence, before trudging back up the bank, “in relation to New Bern, anyway. But you need more than just the thyme and elm, and an apoth-,”

Her sentence dies on her lips. 

Three bows with nocked arrows aim straight for her. 

It slips from her again. 

“Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for coming along. If you're still reading this you're a real one. For anyone concerned, the next chapters will be ramping up the next stage of this plot. If it comforts any of you, there is a strict plot I've been following since the inception of this story. It's been a killer laying the ground work, but I'm so incredibly excited to share the rest with you. 
> 
> Thank you for all those who drop a little heart or give me your analysis and opinions. 
> 
> Also, thank you to NC conservancy pages, who's visit count this pandemic has solely been sponsored by yours truly. If anyone is interested in the botanicals I made a little appendix on my (very fresh) Tumblr: @vespertine-bloom.


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